Dorota Jagoda Michalska is an art historian, curator and Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Central European University in Vienna/Budapest for 2025/2026. She holds a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the University of Oxford, UK.

Her research explores the relationship between art from Eastern Europe and the socio-economic conditions of peripheral modernity within the capitalist world system. She has contributed to peer-reviewed journals (ArtMargins), catalogues (Venice Biennale, 2019; Prague Biennale, 2022; Kyiv Biennale, 2025; Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw), and art magazines (e-flux, L’Internationale, post MoMA, Afterall). Michalska also engages with post/decolonial theory and art from Eastern Europe in relation to modern and contemporary
geopolitical shifts in Crimea, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Her current book project Asynchronous Visions:
Art and Uneven Modernity in 20th Century Poland, offers an account of how modern art from Poland has registered, reacted to, and worked through the peripheral realities of uneven capitalist development. Challenging the prevailing political and national focus of scholarship on art from the region, the study foregrounds a materialist perspective, emphasizing the significance of modes of (semi)peripheral production, class hierarchies, and the historical conditions of global capitalism in shaping artistic practices and cultural production.Spanning from the interwar Second Polish Republic to the post-Soviet decades, the book reflects on art’s changing relationship to the country's peripheral experiences of capitalist modernity and modernization. 

Michalska is also the co-editor of the collection Critical Approaches to Art, Race, and Coloniality in Eastern Europe,(together with Dr Marta Zboralska) forthcoming with Routledge in February 2026. While recent scholarship has challenged the supposed historical isolation of Eastern European art from the colonial matrix of power, the volume critiques the frequent and sometimes uncritical application of established Western postcolonial and decolonial theories to the region's visual production. Instead, it advocates for more nuanced, historically grounded methodologies sensitive to Eastern Europe's specific circumstances as a capitalist (semi)periphery and an area shaped by multiple competing empires. Conceptualized as a critical intervention, the collection amplifies voices from the (semi)periphery to make a significant methodological contribution to debates in the global history of art, foregrounding the variegated nature of colonialism itself.

Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Studies (London, UK) and at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna, Austria). Michalska was also an Assistant Researcher at The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and a Curatorial Fellow at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy. She is part of the Polish section of AICA and a member of SHERA.