Michelle Mansour is an artist who received her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and received a BA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and a Post Baccalaureate degree in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mansour's work investigates the wonder and fear of the interior space of the body. The paintings are meticulously crafted by layering translucent washes of acrylic and building up relief surfaces with ink & silicone. The paintings explore the tension between what we can and cannot control in our own physiology.

Mansour's work has been exhibited in non-profit spaces including Headlands Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, and ProArts, in addition to R.B. Stevenson Gallery (San Diego) and Julie Baker Fine Art (Nevada City, CA). She exhibited her first solo exhibition in the Bay Area at the Berkeley Art Center in April 2004 and was awarded a residency from Djerassi Resident Artists Program, which she completed in April 2005. Recent shows include a solo exhibition at Platform Gallery in Tucson, AZ, and inclusion in Modern Edens, a group show at SPUR Projects in Portola Valley, CA.

Mansour currently teaches drawing and painting in Community Programs at the San Francisco Art Institute and has also taught at Studio One Art Center in Oakland. In addition to teaching adult classes, her work teaching art includes a variety of workshops and summer programs for school age children. She works as the Administrative Director for Root Division, an arts and arts education non-profit in San Francisco. Before moving to the west coast, Mansour was a tenured faculty in the visual arts department at Francis W. Parker School, a private, progressive K-12 school in Chicago. She currently resides in Oakland, CA.