Michelle Tolini Finamore is the Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and has her Ph.D. from the Bard Graduate Center in New York. Books include Gaetano Savini: The Man Who Was Brioni (Assouline, 2015) and Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film (Palgrave, 2013) and the co-authored Jewelry by Artists: In the Studio, 1940-2000 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2010). She has taught courses on fashion, design, and film history at the Rhode Island School of Design and Massachusetts College of Art and previously held posts at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Sotheby’s auction house. She has curated #techstyle, Hollywood Glamour: Fashion and Jewelry from the Silver Screen and Think Pink at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cocktail Culture at the Norton Museum of Art; Driving Fashion: Automobile Upholstery from the 1950s at the Museum at FIT; and assisted with Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Finamore has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from Design History Society, the Harry Ransom Center, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Daniel I. Sargent Memorial Fellowship, and the Kosciuszko Foundation American and received the Members of CINOA Award for Outstanding Dissertation. Finamore was a judge for the DeScience Fashion Show at the MIT Media Lab, September 29, 2014 and has lectured widely and written for both the scholarly and popular press, including European Drama and Performance Studies, Fashion Theory, Architecture Boston, and Gastronomica.
Press
Boston Magazine, Photos from the #Techstyle Opening
Boston Magazine, MFA’s ‘Think Pink’ Exhibit Explores the History and Meaning Behind the Color Pink
Boston Globe, Where food and fashion meet
NPR Marketplace, The Young Italian Who Revolutionized Menswear
NPR Morning Edition, Girls Are Taught To ‘Think Pink,’ But That Wasn’t Always So
Wearable Panel Discussion on Friday, April 21, 2017 from 4:00-6:00pm