Michal Ann Carley has taught nonprofit arts management at Indiana University since 2016. As an artist, she manipulates hot glass and forges and fabricates steel to create sculpture and also designs and fabricates jewelry and decorative work for home and garden. Her work is represented locally at The Venue and at By Hand, where she is an owner/member. Her professional interests include curation, contemporary arts criticism and analysis, nonprofit board relations, project-based arts management, and she has an active art practice.

Previously, Carley taught studio art and practicum, modern art history, and contemporary art history and theory at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (UW-M), where she was also director of the Northwestern Mutual Life Gallery and Museum. At the University Art Museum at UW–M she was curator of art and collections manager, overseeing the UW–M Museum Studies internship program. In those capacities, Carley curated and organized over 50 unique exhibitions and created programming to augment the interdisciplinary and interpretive value of the exhibitions to the universities and to the public.

Carley has written arts criticism for decades. Her writing has been published in numerous publications including The New Art Examiner, Artpapers, Fiberarts, Sculpture, and Metalsmith. She is currently the visual arts contributor to The Ryder magazine in Bloomington, Indiana.

Carley has served as a grant reviewer for the Institute of Museum Services, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the Milwaukee Foundation and she has served on numerous nonprofit arts boards. She currently serves on the Indiana Limestone Symposium and The Indiana Glass Guild boards and on the executive committees of the Bloomington Open Studios Tour and the 4th Street Festival of Arts and Crafts.

In addition to her degrees, Carley has completed 33 hours of non-degree graduate work in Art History, Critical Thinking and Criticism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and completed the majority of her undergraduate work via the BS program in Fine Art and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison between 1973-77.