BIO
Roland Mikhail was born in Edison, New Jersey in 1979 and is the son of Egyptian-born immigrants. He studied at Pratt Institute and received a BFA in 2001. Roland lives and works in New York City.
Roland works in painting and sculpture. He transitioned to painting with airbrushes in 2004 while working in his father’s auto body shop. Roland’s airbrush paintings range up to 6 feet tall and depict human bodies or animals in nature with a sculptural-like quality. His paintings and prints are in private collections in the US, England, and Australia. Ganesha, which depicts an elephant’s head with transposed imagery, showed at Sotheby’s in 2023.
Roland moved into sculpture in 2018. He was selected to be an artist-in-residence at the North American Sculpture Center in 2020. His piece Even Gods Have to be Born, which depicts a baby with flora and fauna on its back, is in the ABC Showroom Gallery in Manhattan. His bust of a horse’s head with the sun on its tongue, entitled Eclipse, was shown in the exhibition “Wander” at ABC in Brooklyn in conjunction with the New York Academy of Art.
In 2024, Roland was the recipient of the New York State Council of the Arts (NYCSA) Artist Grant. He won the Rehs Contemporary Gallery Award in Manhattan and the Joseph Robert Foundation Grant in 2023 as well as the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize in 2021.
For the past ten years, Roland has worked as a scenic artist on television shows for HBO such as Boardwalk Empire and Billions as well as motion pictures like Men in Black III. He has also been an instructor at Pratt Institute in Drawing and Anatomy since 2020 and is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt.