Michael Prokopow is an historian, curator, educator and public intellectual who specializes in material and visual cultures of the Atlantic world after 1500. His research areas include modern design in Canada and the United States, African diasporic expressive culture, contemporary art and critical theory. He has written extensively on architecture, design, craft and art.
Among his publications are Reside: West Coast Contemporary Houses (2024); Hurvin Anderson (2023), which offered a postcolonial reading of the work of the acclaimed Birmingham UK-born painter, (and which was awarded the Historians of British Art Prize) and Smith House II (2018) which interrogated Arthur Erickson’s eponymous 1966 West Vancouver house for artists Marion and Gordon Smith).
His curatorial works include an exhibition of western Canadian ceramics for the Glenbow in Calgary, Alberta, opening in early 2027, the 2016, nationally-toured True Nordic: How Scandinavia influenced Design in Canada, (with Dr. Rachel Gotlieb), and the 2012 exhibition: Meanings in Architecture which considered the international career of architect, theorist and educator George Baird.
Prokopow has served on the board of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario and serves currently on the board of the Arthur Erickson Foundation, among others.
His current projects include an interrogation of material self-fashioning in North America after 1945 and an extended consideration of and advocacy for a decolonized museology (work begun in Canada and advanced in two scholarly residencies at the Yale Center for British Art).
Prokopow holds a PhD from Harvard University and is a faculty member at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario.