Biography

Michelle Haberl is a multi-media artist originally from Texas, recently residing in (not always sunny) Philadelphia, PA, and currently located in Las Cruces, NM. She holds an MFA in Painting & Drawing from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a BA in Studio Art from Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. Additionally, she has spent a number of semesters at the Texas Academy of Figurative Art, Studio Incamminati, and the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art where her love of figurally-infused abstractionism led her to its naissance in the cloistered villas of Northwest France.

Relocating from her home in Texas to Philadelphia in 2013, Michelle began pursuit of a graduate degree in figuration at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest museum and art school in the United States. Upon graduation two years later, her moveable thesis mural “Four Horsemen & Women; Seven Lampstands” made its brief expo at the CODA Building in MergeArts Pop-Up Show where it caused a sensation as a quasi-religious backdrop to the event’s runway fashion show. Subsequently, Michelle’s work has seen much publicity as part of the niche market that Philadelphia and the larger Northeast Corridor provide, her watercolor and pastel sketches exhibiting regionally and nation-wide at the Da Vinci Art Alliance, 3rd Street Gallery, the Philadelphia Plastic Club, Era Contemporary, and the prestigious Barnes Foundation, as well as at ConArtist Collective in New York City and at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, where her 18’ oil painting “The Big Picture” remains on semi-permanent loan. More recently, her spacious digital photography has made an appearance at the International House Philadelphia, Salem Community College, and the Woolen Mill Gallery in Reedsburg, WI, where she spent the summer of 2018 as Artist-in-Residence at the Wormfarm Institute investigating non-traditional medias and cultivating vegetables on the picturesque organic farm.

Since her pedagogical beginnings as a teaching assistant at Texas A&M University in 2008, Michelle has taught at a variety of art centers, camps, and venues throughout the Greater Philadelphia region and continues to share her passion for art with students at several universities & community colleges in Central & South Jersey. Such establishments include Georgian Court University, Rowan University, Rowan College at Burlington Co., and Salem Community College—a mecca for glass artists as the nation’s only degree-granting institution in Scientific Glass. Of late, Michelle answered the call to teach full-time at New Mexico State University where she invested her time and energy as "Visiting Professor – Painting/Drawing" for the 2022-2023 academic year and proximally at the University of Texas at El Paso and at El Paso Community College where she serves as part-time faculty member. All seven schools feature prominently among those accredited by Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the New Mexico Higher Education Department, and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.

When not drawing, painting, installing, or instructing, Michelle enjoys assisting and volunteering on murals at the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, swimming laps, hiking, cycling, and taking long walks along the Schuylkill River banks.