Josephine Halvorson appointed to Yale School of Art Faculty in Painting/Printmaking

The Yale School of Art is pleased to share that Josephine Halvorson will join the faculty as the Assistant Director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking in the Fall of 2026. Halvorson makes art from direct observation, foregrounding the firsthand experience of noticing, describing, and learning from the physical world. Working primarily in painting, as well as sculpture and printmaking, her practice centers attention and an embodied relationship to time and place. She also maintains a writing practice and is currently working on a series of essays about painting from life.

Halvorson has extensive experience as a teacher and an academic leader. Meleko Mokgosi, Director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking and chair of the search committee, noted “We are thrilled to welcome Josephine to our community! As a world renowned and critically acclaimed painter that has and continues to make invaluable contributions to the field of art and aesthetics, and with decades of experience successfully developing curricula, fostering community and mentoring both undergraduate and graduate students, she brings a wealth of knowledge and experience centered on duty of care that will greatly benefit our community. Our students, staff and faculty are all looking forward to working with Josephine.”

Halvorson joins the Yale School of Art from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, where she has served since 2016 as Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting. In her role as chair, she led efforts to rebuild the MFA Painting program and founded the Tuesday Night Lecture Series, which has welcomed more than 120 contemporary artists, designers, and scholars to their campus. Halvorson has also taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Cooper Union, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Columbia University. From 2010-16, Halvorson served in various critic positions in the Yale School of Art. She lectures regularly on her work at institutions of higher learning throughout the country.

Halvorson received her BFA from The Cooper Union, her MFA from Columbia University, and attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Solo and two person exhibitions include the Center for the Arts, Virginia Tech; the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Maine; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, where she was the inaugural Artist-in-Residence; the Havana Biennial; and Storm King Art Center, New York. Group exhibitions include the ICA Boston and the Milwaukee Museum of Art. Her work is represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York, and Peter Freeman, Paris, and is in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston, the Colby College Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Tang Teaching Museum, and the Orlando Museum of Art, among others.

Halvorson is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She has been granted residencies from MacDowell, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the US Fulbright to Austria, and was the first American to receive the Rome Prize at the French Academy at the Villa Medici, Rome, Italy. Halvorson’s work and practice have been written about widely in online and print periodicals such as The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Artforum, and Hyperallergic, and have appeared in compilation books such as Painting Now by Suzanne Hudson; Vitamin P2, edited by Barry Schwabsky; and Prints and Their Makers by Phil Sanders. Halvorson is a subject of Art21’s documentary series New York Close Up.

The School of Art would like to note the thoughtful and dedicated work of the selection committee: Meleko Mokgosi, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking; Alexandria Smith, Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art; Martin Kersels, Professor in Sculpture; and Keely Orgeman, Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.