Booking and details
Reserve Your SpotDates Fri, Nov 21, 2025, at 6:30pm
Venue Stuart and Mimi Rose Rare Book and Manuscript Exhibition Hall
Tickets Free; registration requested
Walk-up attendees will be accommodated day of, subject to availability.
Join us for a gallery talk with Missy Dunaway as part of Contemporary Art at the Folger, a rotating series that showcases the work of Folger Artist Fellows.
Blending acrylic ink with research, Missy Dunaway investigates the connections between art, literature, history, and the natural world. Her ongoing project The Birds of Shakespeare visually catalogs every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays and poems—at least 65 species!
Kick off the season by learning about the early modern holiday associations of three avian favorites: the Wild Turkey, Greylag Goose, and Eurasian Wren.
About the artist
Missy Dunaway
She earned a BFA with a concentration in Painting and Material & Visual Culture from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010. Soon after, she moved to Istanbul on a Fulbright Fellowship, beginning several years of international travel through artist residencies. Her sketchbooks from this period were published in 2021 as The Traveling Artist: A Visual Journal.
Dunaway is a recipient of a Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellowship, a scholarship to the Academy of Realist Art Boston, and she was selected as a Four Seasons Envoy for a creative project filmed in Vietnam. She has illustrated book covers for acclaimed authors including Ruskin Bond and Raja Rao, and she penned 21 articles for the Folger Shakespeare’s Library’s blog, Shakespeare & Beyond.
Related
Birds of Shakespeare: The greylag goose
Artist Missy Dunaway concludes her Birds of Shakespeare series with the greylag goose, the subject of Romeo and Mercutio’s rapid-fire puns in Romeo and Juliet.
Birds of Shakespeare: The peregrine falcon
Falconry plays an important role in Shakespeare’s world, and Shakespeare peppers falconry terminology throughout his dialogue, Missy Dunaway explores.
About Folger Institute
The Folger Institute is a center for early modern research at the Folger Shakespeare Library that brings public audiences together with researchers to explore the cultures and legacies of the early modern world. Learn more.