Michelle Favin (b. 1989) is a mixed-race Korean American painter based in California. Guided by Buddhist principles and Korean shamanic traditions, her work explores the intersection of meditative practice and modern life. Through intuitive layers of natural pigments, oil, and ink, her paintings are an intimate record of this self-excavation — each mark a response to the push and pull between stillness and movement, presence and distraction, interconnection and individuation.

Working within her spiritual lineages in an increasingly fractured world, Favin's studio practice ultimately attempts to unearth inherited wisdom to help guide how to make a life feel whole. Her paintings emerge as sites of contemplation, where personal excavation reveal threads of collective resonance and collective questioning — how do we pause in the space between stimulus and response and what emerges when we do?

image by Colleen Phan-Eversman

solo exhibitions

2024, Following the Footsteps, Glass Rice, San Francisco, CA

group exhibitions

2025, The River Never Runs Dry, Glass Rice, San Francisco, CA
2024, residency group 43, PADA studios, Barriero, Portugal
2023, Pyramid Scheme, Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA
2022, Animus, Arcana Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2022, Small Works, Soft Times Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2017, love in the time of, Gutman Gallery, Cambridge, MA
2017, herCreative, Gutman Gallery, Cambridge, MA
2016, exist, American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA

education and residencies

2024, Residency Group 43, PADA studios, Barriero, Portugal
2017, Artist-in-Residence, Project Zero, Harvard University
2017, M.Ed., Arts in Education, Harvard University
2011, B.A., Sociology of Race and Education, New York University


publications

i wrote this to heal by Alysha English, Elizabeth Co., 2021
Designed layout and book cover.

—of Earth, 10th Floor Studio, 2020
Contributed artwork from “beautiful time” series

of Juliet, Juliet Mediaverse, 2019
Contributed custom artwork and illustrations

 

Overview of an interactive and collaborative art-making and storytelling event series about radical, inclusive, expansive and socially-conscious love. Spring 2017 with the Arts in Education Action Collective. Cambridge, MA.

For inquiries, to say hello, email below or message here.

michelle@byfavin.com