About

Desiree Duell is a mother, an interdisciplinary artist, and community maker based in Flint, Michigan. She is a proud fourth generation Flintstone.

She views art as both an inward and outward facing process in her life practice to strengthen and heal disenfranchised communities.

Her practice over the past twenty years has focused on intersectional issues of poverty through collectively dismantling infrastructures of oppression and developing models of liberation at the municipal, organizational, and grassroots level. Working on both micro and macro scale, her embodied research examines trauma of the body politic through gentrification. Designing and producing grassroots community infrastructure for public space, food access, and youth development. Working in both urban and rural areas, her work is grounded in social bridging and creating equitable commons.

She researches and collects the residue of poverty, propaganda, consumerism, and environmental injustice in American culture.  Her work manifests as performance, public speaking, community organizing, organizational development, photography, collage, sculpture, and installation.

She has collaborated with numerous organizations across the United States including PICO National Network, Flint Public Art Project, and Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Michigan Radio, Detroit Art Review, and Actipedia. She has received generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Aspen Institute, and the Ruth Mott Foundation. 

She has a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Maine College of Art, a Master of Arts in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Art From University of Hartford.