Monica Obniski is the Demmer Curator of 20th and 21st Century Design at the Milwaukee Art Museum. She was the inaugural Ann S. and Samuel M. Mencoff Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago and a Research Assistant in the Department of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received her MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design from the Bard Graduate Center (New York), and will defend her dissertation, “Accumulating Things: Folk Art and Modern Design in the Postwar American Projects of Alexander H. Girard (1907-1993)” at the University of Illinois at Chicago this spring. Obniski has taught art history at the University of Illinois, Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, and has received fellowships from FIU-The Wolfsonian and the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design.

She has published a number of scholarly articles and contributed to publications, including Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago (2009) and For Kith and Kin: The Folk Art Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (2012), and is currently working on the reinstallation of the design galleries for the Milwaukee Art Museum.