In 2019, Thomas was the first to receive the Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum and was a United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow in 2015. Thomas holds a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally. Her most notable  solo exhibitions include Better Nights, Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2019); Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018) and Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2019); I Can’t See You Without Me, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018), MUSE traveling exhibition with Aperture Foundation (2015-2019), Mickalene Thomas: Do I Look Like a Lady? Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); Waiting on a Prime Time Star, Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX and Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans (2017); Mickalene Thomas: Mentors, Muses and Celebrities, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2017); and  Origin of the Universe  Brooklyn Museum (2012). Additional solo exhibitions have been organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Monaco. Select Notable group exhibitions include, “Posing Modernity,” at Columbia University, New York (2018), “30 Americans, ” a traveling exhibition with the Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2008-2019),“Figuring History, ” at the Seattle Art Museum (2018), and “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1, Queens (2005). Thomas’s work is in numerous private and public collections including Akron Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Detroit Art Institute, Hammer Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musee de Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MoMA, Nelson Atkins Museum, Rubell Family Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Tang Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

At the forefront of her field, Thomas’s work has appeared in numerous catalogues and reviewed extensively by Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, NY Arts, Modern Painters, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Thomas has participated in residency programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2002-2003) and the Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program in Giverny, France (2011). Recent commissions include Better Days, Galerie at Volkshaus, Basel, Switzerland (with Absolut Vodka Art Bureau); as well as mural projects for NY MTA, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority; Art in Embassies Program at the United States Embassy in Dakar, Senegal; and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn. Her film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman was featured on HBO and received the Black Star Film Festival Audience Awards-Favorite Short in 2013. Thomas has been honored by MoMA PS1 (2015), and BOMB Magazine, MoCADA Artistic Advocacy Award (2015), AICA-USA Best Show in a Commercial Space Nationally (2014), Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2012), Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award (2012), Timerhi Award for Leadership in the Arts (2012), Joan Mitchell Grant (2009), and Rema Hort Mann Grant (2007).

Thomas’s curatorial work is marked by the group exhibition, MUSE: tete-a-tete, Aperture (2012-2018) that features key works by artists that have inspired her or that she in turn has inspired. The exhibition has taken multiple forms as the selection of work shifts as it has traveled extensively across the country. Thomas recently began a curatorial collaborative, Deux Femmes Noires, with her partner and muse Racquel Chevremont. Their debut exhibition, The Aesthetics of Matter, premiered in the curated section of the Volta New York art fair in 2018. Most recently they organized Brand New Heavies, an exhibition featuring site-specific commissions by Abigail DeVille, Xaviera Simmons, and Rosa-Johan Uddoh that premiered at Pioneer Works, New York in 2021.

Thomas works with a number of galleries internationally, including Lévy Gorvy, New York; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; Susanne Vielmetter  Los Angeles Projects; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels; and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.She serves as a trustee on the Board of the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1 New York.