Edited by C21 Graduate Fellow Azin Naderi
Maria Novotny, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English and a 2026-27 C21 Research Fellow.
In a State of IF, co-curated by Dr. Novotny, is on view at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design’s Frederick Layton Gallery through November 21.
Hi Professor Novotny! Thank you for agreeing to speak with us. To begin, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests?
I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where my teaching and research bring together rhetoric, writing studies, reproductive justice, and the public humanities. My work explores how storytelling, art, and other forms of creative expression help people communicate experiences that are often stigmatized, marginalized, or left out of public conversations.
My scholarship is informed by my own experience with infertility, which has shaped my commitment to reproductive justice research, advocacy, and community engagement. I study infertility, assisted reproductive technologies, pregnancy and infant loss, and family building, with particular attention to how lived experiences challenge dominant narratives about reproduction, health, and family. I’m also the co-director of The ART of Infertility, a public humanities project that uses art, storytelling, and community-based exhibitions to make visible experiences of infertility and reproductive loss.
The ART of Infertility began more than a decade ago, and your dissertation grew out of it. How did your own experiences, together with your training in rhetoric, lead you to treat visual art as a form of advocacy?
The ART of Infertility began in 2014, when I met artist Elizabeth Horn at an infertility advocacy day. We were both interested in how creative practices could help people process and communicate their experiences with infertility. I was also navigating infertility myself, so this work emerged from a deeply personal place. I began to see art as a kind of vessel: a way to hold and communicate the embodied, often invisible grief of infertility and tell a person’s story or express their relationship to infertility without requiring them to speak about it directly. Artwork could travel into public spaces on someone’s behalf, allowing them to share something deeply personal without having to be physically present, explain their experience, or take up the emotional labor of telling their story over and over again.
My training in rhetoric, particularly cultural rhetorics, helped me theorize why this mattered. My dissertation grew out of this work and examined curation as a form of composition: the intentional selection, arrangement, and contextualization of materials to create public encounters that shape what and how we know. For me, this is where curation becomes advocacy. Advocacy does not always require someone to speak at a microphone or tell their story directly. Sometimes, it begins by creating the conditions for their story to be seen and heard.
“Care” runs through your scholarship, from your early “Research as Care” work to your call to decolonize narratives of trauma. How does a care-centered approach shape the way you gather, curate, and share someone’s story of loss?
For me, care is not just an ethical principle or a methodology; it is an ongoing responsibility to the people whose experiences make my research possible. An infertility diagnosis, or the experience of trying to build a family, does not necessarily end at a particular moment. The story we tell about infertility at one moment in our lives may not be the story we would tell two or three years later.
I have learned this through my work with The ART of Infertility. There have been moments when I have shared an artist’s work in an exhibition and later realized that how they understood their infertility, or how they wanted their work to represent that experience, had changed. Those experiences have taught me that my responsibility cannot end when an interview is complete or an exhibition opens.
Care means recognizing that people are not static research participants or their stories frozen in time. They are people with evolving lives, and my relationships with them—and my responsibilities to them—need to evolve, too.
In a State of IF began as a call to Wisconsin artists, responding to what it means to build a family in a state without an insurance mandate for fertility care. Was there a particular piece, or a moment during selection or installation, that surprised or moved you?
One piece I was especially excited to bring to In a State of IF at MIAD was Meghan Szidik’s Metamorphosis. I was particularly excited to share it in a college gallery because, as a professor, I’m always thinking about how we can create connections between reproductive justice and college students’ lives.
Meghan created Metamorphosis as an undergraduate at Michigan State University in a special topics course focused on reproductive justice. For her project, Meghan read and worked with her mother’s IVF journals to better understand her mother’s experience with infertility and the journey that ultimately led to Meghan’s birth. If you look closely at the butterflies in the piece, you’ll find writing drawn from her mother’s journals.
I love the title Metamorphosis because it captures so many layers of transformation: Meghan’s evolving understanding of her mother’s experience, their relationship, and the ways our understanding of infertility can change over time.
Today, many young adults know someone who was conceived through IVF, donor sperm, donor eggs, or other assisted reproductive technologies. And yet Wisconsin still lacks an insurance mandate for fertility treatment. For me, Metamorphosis makes that contradiction visible in a deeply personal way. It reminds us that behind every conversation about fertility care and insurance coverage are real people, relationships, and families—and that reproductive justice must include the ability to build a family without financial barriers determining who gets that opportunity.
In “Misconception Fatigue,” you describe the toll that builds when people with infertility must repeatedly disclose and explain their experiences in order to advocate for care. How has the post-Roe landscape changed that burden, and the questions you’re asking as a scholar?
In “Misconception Fatigue,” I write about the emotional and rhetorical labor that people experiencing infertility are repeatedly asked to perform. In the post-Roe v. Wade landscape, this burden has become more complicated because infertility is increasingly entangled in political debates about reproductive rights, IVF, and who should be able to build a family.
I’m particularly interested in how grassroots advocates are navigating this landscape. One strategy I’ve been watching closely is the development of pro-family campaigns that frame the issue through the message that coverage equals families. Pro-family language can create common ground and help advocates make a case for broader access to care, but it can also be appropriated in ways that privilege some family structures over others or undermine reproductive autonomy.
Ultimately, I want to understand how we can share the responsibility for challenging misinformation rather than continually asking people experiencing infertility to disclose their pain and educate others just to have their needs recognized. Their work raises an important question for me as a scholar: how can research help support and learn from that labor without placing yet another burden on the people already doing it?
What do you hope visitors, especially those with no personal experience of infertility, take away from the exhibition? And what are you working on next?
I want visitors to leave In a State of IF with a deeper understanding of what it means to live with infertility and the challenges people face when trying to build a family. But the exhibition is about more than building empathy. I want visitors to understand that infertility is not just an individual or medical issue. I hope, then, that visitors leave with a sense that these challenges are not inevitable. They are shaped by systems and policies that people can work to change.
As for what’s next, we’re working to build on In a State of IF by developing a new exhibition focused on third-party reproduction—the many ways people build families with the help of others, including through surrogacy and donor eggs, sperm, or embryos. We’re particularly interested in centering the experiences of people and families who rely on these pathways to parenthood, including LGBTQ+ families and people whose cancer treatment or other medical circumstances affect their ability to conceive or carry a pregnancy. Ultimately, this is an extension of what we set out to do with The ART of Infertility: use art and storytelling to make experiences that are often misunderstood or marginalized more visible.
Maria Novotny (she/her) is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee whose work draws on a reproductive justice framework to examine reproductive advocacy, infertility, and recurrent reproductive loss. Her co-edited collection, Infertilities, A Curation (Wayne State University Press, 2023), portrays the ranging experiences of infertility through art and writing.
In 2022, she established and continues to serve as PI for the Center for 21st Century Studies Reproductive Justice Collaboratory at UW-Milwaukee. In 2020, she co-founded the Building Families Alliance of WI, a coalition of Wisconsinites advocating for fertility-friendly state legislation and reducing inequities in family building. Since 2014, she has served as Co-Director of The ART of Infertility, an arts-based infertility storytelling project, and in 2018 was recognized by RESOLVE: The National Infertility and Family Building Association for her innovative approach to infertility advocacy through the arts and storytelling.
She is also the co-curator of In a State of IF, a group exhibition featuring the work of 30+ artists exploring infertility, reproductive loss, and the uncertainties surrounding reproductive decision-making. The exhibition is on view at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design’s Frederick Layton Gallery from August 17 through November 21, 2026.