Michaela Yearwood-Dan was born to Caribbean parents in London, England in 1994. Following her UK art education, she has established herself as an artist focusing on different themes, including those of Blackness, queer communities and femininity. An exhibitor with Bloomberg New Contemporaries, in 2023 she was appointed Art of Empowerment Artist for UN Women UK in the sixth edition of the programme where sales of artworks benefit the UN Women’s Emergency Funds currently distributed in Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria and Ukraine.
Artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan was born in South London, England in 1994, of Caribbean heritage (Grenada and Barbados). Her education in the arts began at the University of the Creative Arts Epsom where she completed an Art Foundation course in 2013. In 2016, she earned her BA Honours in Fine Art Painting at the University of Brighton.
Her oeuvre includes paintings, works on paper, ceramics, site-specific murals and sound installations, ranging from large-scale paintings to smaller, more personal ceramics and paper works, often exuding a warm and intimate quality. She incorporates botanical patterns and reflective diary-like thoughts into her paintings, which are characterised by abstract strokes and thick drips of paint. Thematically, her work focuses on abundance, Blackness, creating queer community spaces, femininity, healing rituals, and joy, as well as the imagery of acrylic nails, carnival culture, flowers and golden hoop earrings, mixing the public and the private. She works in both figurative and non-figurative expression, often blending textual snippets from songs, poetry, or her own reflections, with botanical forms in a dynamic composition, at times generating humorous takes on politics and popular culture. Of her image-text combinations she has stated: ‘I find language quite interesting. I also am dyslexic. Although I speak English as my main language, I enjoy playing around with words and phrases from other cultures and languages, for example, from my Caribbean heritage or from South London, which is where I grew up,’ (Yearwood-Dan quoted in Franchetti and Shan, 2021). Her artistic influences include Noah Davis, Hilma af Klint, Henri Matisse, Chris Ofili and Jennifer Packer. During the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests she openly criticised the 1:54 Art Fair in London for gaining financial benefits from diversity, yet failing to actively support the cause, drawing a parallel with how corporations support Pride.
She regularly exhibits in London and abroad. In 2022, she held a solo show at Tiwani Contemporary, titled The Sweetest Taboo. Focusing on BIPOC and queer communities, Yearwood-Dan blended personal reflections with abstract and botanical elements in her large-scale paintings, ceramic sculptures and furniture. This generated an immersive space that invited visitors to contemplate themes of femme, black, and queer communities, love, humour and nostalgia and to envision utopian possibilities. That same year she had an exhibition in London’s Queercircle. Let me Hold You - inspired by bell hooks’ (the pen name of American writer and activist, Gloria Jean Watkins) contemplation on love - creating a welcoming space for the LGBTQ+ community, with a mural and her ceramics fostering self-exploration and connection and calling for love as a response to injustices, particularly as marginalized communities and nature face escalating challenges. In 2023, Yearwood-Dan participated in a group exhibition at Gagosian titled Rites of Passage, curated by the British-Nigerian curator Péjú Oshin, which focused on the theme of migration as a 'liminal space,' as defined by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 book, from which the exhibition took its title. The exhibition was divided into three thematic areas – separation, transition, and return – and explored the physical, spiritual, and emotional aspects of migration.
In 2017, Yearwood-Dan was part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in London, a platform recognising emerging artists. This was followed in 2018 by the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Studio Bursary, a collaboration with Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation in London. In 2019 she was part of the Future Assembly with Vansa Residency, which spanned Johannesburg, London, and Lagos, and the Carpenters Wharf Studio Residency in London. She is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, USA. Michaela Yearwood-Dan lives and works in London. In 2023, her highest sale to date reached £730,800 at Christie's London for the large-scale artwork Love me nots (2021). That same year she was appointed Art of Empowerment Artist for UN Women UK in the sixth edition of the programme where the sales of artworks are used to benefit the UN Women’s Emergency Funds, currently distributed in Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria and Ukraine. In the UK her work is held in several public collections, including the Government Art Collection and The Perimeter and the Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation.