Michelle Charest

Michelle Charest is an anthropologist, archaeologist, textile artist/designer, and naturalist specializing in traditional Indigenous and historic fiber arts. At RISD, Michelle’s enthusiastic teaching has focused on Indigenous art and architecture within global contexts. She believes that Indigenous arts education is an essential component of promoting Indigenous rights and awareness among non-Indigenous populations. Indigenous rights, repatriation issues, and concerns about cultural appropriation are all central to her courses.

Michelle’s interests in textiles and fiber arts are extremely wide-ranging, particularly addressing every stage of the production chain using small-scale traditional and Indigenous approaches, from sourcing and preparing pigments and fibers to spinning, dyeing, weaving, knitting, finishing, sewing, cleaning, and preservation. Her work embraces the use of color and creatively borrowing materials and methods from outside of the textile/fiber world. Michelle’s textile studio/workshop is called Hedge Witch Labs.

Ongoing research projects include exploring traditional and Indigenous ways of making with people of different ages and learning abilities and with limited resources and experience; emphasizing Indigenous futurism, Afrofuturism, and other diverse interpretations of science fiction and fantasy; looking at Indigenous and historic uses of space and place in relation to sound and auditory history; researching plants found in temperate North America as pigment sources with the hope of finding a productive use of excess biomass created by invasive species; and looking at queer, disruptive, active, joyous, powerful, progressive work being done by people living with physical and mental disabilities and accessibility challenges.

Watch Michelle’s March 2025 TEDx Talk: Finding Epic Color in the Everyday.