Booking and details
Plan your visitDates Fri, Nov 14, 2025 – Sun, Jan 4, 2026
Venue Stuart and Mimi Rose Rare Book and Manuscript Exhibition Hall
Tickets Free; timed-entry pass recommended
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—in consultation with an ornithologist and a scholar of early modern natural history. Dunaway’s detailed work reminds us that wildlife destruction is a cultural loss as well as an environmental one.
About Contemporary Art at the Folger
Each year, the Folger Shakespeare Library awards fellowships to artists whose creative work is grounded in research on the stories, art, and objects in our collection. From October 2025 to April 2026, the Folger will feature boutique-style solo shows highlighting selected works by artist fellows from across the country. The series will conclude with a final exhibition at Transformer DC, in the Logan Circle neighborhood.
Related
Gallery Talk: Missy Dunaway
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.
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.