Bio
Josephine Halvorson (she/her) makes art from direct observation, foregrounding the firsthand experience of noticing, describing, and learning from the physical world. She works primarily in painting, but also in sculpture and printmaking.
Halvorson received her MFA from Columbia University in 2007, her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003, and attended Yale Norfolk in 2002. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), the Artist Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2026), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2010), and a Fulbright Fellowship to Austria (2003-4). She has participated in artist residencies, including Macdowell (2025-26), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2016), and was the first American pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici (2014-15).
Halvorson’s work is represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, NY, and Peter Freeman, Paris. She has presented work internationally at such institutions as the Storm King Art Center, the ICA Boston, and the Havana Biennale. In 2021 she presented a solo exhibition of site responsive work at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM, where she was the Museum’s first artist in residence. In 2024 she presented a solo exhibition at James Fuentes, Los Angeles, accompanied by a paperback monograph. In early 2026, she will present a solo exhibition at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York.
Her 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.
Halvorson is currently the Assistant Director of Painting/Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. From 2016-2026, she served as Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. She has also taught at The Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and Columbia University, and lectures regularly on her work.
