Painting the Bard’s Birds

CMU alumna Missy Dunaway explores the intersection of Shakespeare and art

Carnegie Mellon University alumna Missy Dunaway is bringing the world of William Shakespeare to life, one bird at a time.

Dunaway is the artist behind “The Birds of Shakespeare,” a collection of paintings cataloging every bird mentioned in Shakespeare's plays and poems.

The project combines her passion for Shakespeare with her interests in birds, literature and language.

“Each bird is so different from one another,” said Dunaway, who received a bachelor’s degree in humanities and arts from CMU in 2010. “Each bird has presented a new rabbit hole to studying early modern culture and Shakespearean literature and theater. I'm never running out of new things to explore through this project.”

Facts Take Flight

Dunaway came up with the idea for “The Birds of Shakespeare” during lunch with a friend at CMU.

“He said ‘I just don't get Shakespeare. He's confusing and complicated. I don't know what he's saying. Frankly, I think he's overrated,’” she says. “And I said ‘I agree. Shakespeare is definitely complicated. He can be very hard to understand. And yes, at times he is boring, but I don't think he's overrated.’”

To support her opinion, she shared statistics she’d learned in a class taught by Scott Sandage, associate professor of history — Shakespeare had a vocabulary of more than 30,000 unique words, he invented or introduced around 1,700 words and he mentioned 64 unique species of birds in his work.

“When I said that, I thought ‘Oh, that would be a really good idea for a painting,’” she says.

A few years later during her first artisan residence program at Vermont Studio Center, Dunaway created an eight-foot painting of feathers from every bird mentioned by Shakespeare. She sent a photo of the painting to Sandage, who shared it with former CMU professor Michael Witmore who is now the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., where the painting is now on display.

“I was proud of the painting and I was overjoyed with where it ended up because it could not be in a more perfect place,” said Dunaway. “But I always had this feeling that the concept had more potential and it could be a bigger project. I just didn’t know how.”

Project Migration

After her residence program, Dunaway was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. She traveled to Turkey to study Anatolian textiles, which are woven rugs and fabrics from the Anatolian Peninsula that feature vibrant colors and abstract designs. From there, she spent five years traveling the world and sketching, eventually turning those sketches into a book, “The Traveling Artist: A Visual Journal.”

She also never gave up on the idea of painting Shakespeare’s birds.

“I thought when I have the time, when I'm no longer traveling, I'm going to come back to the birds of Shakespeare,” said Dunaway. “And then COVID gave me that opportunity. So I thought, now's the moment. And what would be the obvious, natural progression of the project? Instead of one feather for each bird, I would do one painting for each bird.”

After starting the collection, Dunaway realized she needed help to see it through.

“I discovered very quickly that I was in out of my depth and this project was getting huge,” she says. “I didn't have enough knowledge to really do the project justice and make it as strong as I wanted.”

She began emailing scholars around the world to see if anyone was interested in helping. That led her back to Witmore and the Folger Institute, which granted her an artistic research fellowship to develop the project.

Dunaway now collaborates with a Shakespeare scholar, an avian ecologist and a botanist on every painting to ensure her depictions are as realistic and as accurate as possible. She has painted 25 out of 64 birds to date.

Bringing Ideas to Life

Dunaway wasn’t interested in painting when she enrolled at CMU. She wanted to be able to support herself as an artist, so she focused instead on drawing with the intention of pursuing a career as an illustrator.

It didn’t take long for her perspective to change.

“I discovered very quickly that I had enough to say on my own,” said Dunaway. “I wanted to bring to life my own ideas rather than someone else's vision. So I abandoned that idea pretty quickly when I was in college and devoted myself to independent fine art.”

She credits the BXA intercollege degree program for helping her become the artist she is today.

“That interdisciplinary approach to art — not only art but the other disciplines that are brought in under the program’s umbrella — shaped my outlook on art and helped me develop my personal style,” she says.

Whether she’s painting or drawing, Dunaway is thankful to CMU for giving her the tools she needed to succeed as an artist.

 “I'm really thankful for the network and supportive resources that Carnegie Mellon provided that allowed me to pursue my passion seriously and make a career out of it, even though it's a very difficult path to take,” she says.