Michaela Yearwood-Dan

Michaela Yearwood-Dan was born in 1994 in London, United Kingdom, where she still lives and works. She completed an Art Foundation at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom, in 2013, and earned a BA in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton in 2016. Her paintings combine large, saturated color fields, botanical and floral motifs, and handwritten or inscribed text, working through themes of romantic love, grief, joy, and queer Black identity.

In October 2021, she joined the roster of Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, and in 2024 Hauser & Wirth announced that it would also represent her, a significant step for an artist still in her early thirties. Her first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, "No Time for Despair," opened in London in 2025. In 2026 she opened "The Practice of Liberation," her first UK institutional solo exhibition, at The Whitworth in Manchester, a show co-produced with Arnolfini and Towner Eastbourne that continues touring into 2027. She was profiled by The New York Times' T Magazine in May 2026 ahead of the Whitworth opening, speaking from her studio in East London.

Yearwood-Dan has been covered by outlets including Artnet, Phaidon, and The New York Times' T Magazine, which have tracked her rapid movement from graduate shows to gallery representation with Marianne Boesky and then Hauser & Wirth, and on to her first UK institutional solo exhibition at The Whitworth in 2026. Coverage consistently returns to the emotional directness of her painting, floral and botanical abstraction paired with confessional or affirming text, and its engagement with love, healing, and queer Black identity. No verbatim critical assessment could be confirmed against a named critic in a major outlet at the time of writing, so none is quoted here; the throughline across profiles is an artist whose institutional and gallery momentum has been unusually fast for her age.

Yearwood-Dan's auction record is held by "Love me nots" (2021), which sold at Christie's London in spring 2023 for a hammer price reported as USD 880,000, a result described by Phaidon as roughly twelve times the work's initial estimate. The exact figure in pounds sterling has not been independently confirmed and is not reported here. Other public sales tracked by Artsy and Phillips have come in well below that figure, including a Phillips Hong Kong sale of a work from the "Love letters to Siri" series at a price far under the Christie's result. Her secondary market remains small in volume, consistent with an artist only ten years out of her BA, and each new result should be read against that limited sale history rather than as an established trend line.

Yearwood-Dan is an early-career artist: there is no catalogue raisonne, and her auction history is limited to a small number of lots, so any single result, including her Christie's record, carries real statistical uncertainty and should not be extrapolated into a broader price trend. Her market strength currently rests more on gallery and museum validation, Hauser & Wirth and Marianne Boesky representation, museum holdings at institutions like the Hirshhorn and the Columbus Museum of Art, and a 2026 UK institutional touring show, than on a long or deep auction record. Collectors should treat her as a developing market to watch rather than one with an established pricing history.