“My work is improvisational, rarely started with a planned image. The hard looking and decision making lead to things that consistently surprise me. I am always learning.”

Michal Shapiro is also a musician and a world music journalist with a videoblog on her own YouTube channel, as well as her site worldmusicandculture.com and Vimeo.

Over the past three years, she has also worked as a videographer in conjunction with Sonic Twist, the duo of Bruce Arnold (guitar) and Judi Silvano (voice). Responding to their impromptu sessions, she started to create more adventurous art-oriented videos. They can be found here on this site as well, under “Experimental videos.”

Michal Shapiro is a visual artist whose work has been used most conspicuously in the TV series “Mad Men.” Her painting “Butternut” was used in Don Draper’s office at Sterling Cooper, and is practically iconic there. Other settings of her work can be seen in movies (“Away We Go,” “Trumbo”), commercials and TV shows.

She attended Queens College to acquire academic skills in Art. At that time, the faculty of the QC art department was focused on figurative art; however professors Herbert Aach and Gerald Hahn were influential in her transition into abstraction. This solidified in the late 70’s through her exposure to the various painters she met in the then flourishing Soho scene, most prominently, Thornton Willis.