My name is Maria Novotny, and I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I’m a scholar, writer, curator, and community-engaged practitioner working at the intersections of rhetoric, reproductive justice, health advocacy, storytelling, and the arts. Trained in writing, rhetoric, and professional communication, my interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of reproductive loss and infertility, reproductive health technologies and data collection, health advocacy, and patient lived experience. Through community-engaged methods, my scholarship develops an ethics of care framework that centers the knowledge-making practices of reproductive health communities and explores community-based approaches to research, decision-making, and consent.

Research, Community, and Care

My work addressing an ethics-of-care approach has been published in Rhetoric Review, ALRA, Community Literacy Journal, Peitho, Communication Design Quarterly, Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, Technical Communication Quarterly, Computers and Composition, and Reflections, among other venues. Across this work, I explore how an ethics-of-care framework can help writing and rhetoric studies better engage with—and ultimately support—the communities relevant to our research and teaching. I’m particularly interested in how people and communities make knowledge about their own experiences, and what researchers can learn when we take that knowledge seriously.

These commitments to community care grew from my collaboration with The ART of Infertility, an arts-based storytelling and advocacy project with which I have worked since 2014. As a co-director, I collaborate with artists, patients, advocates, health professionals, and community organizations to create exhibitions, public programs, storytelling projects, and other spaces for people to share experiences of infertility, reproductive loss, and family building. This work has been recognized as a Rhetorics for All project through the Rhetoric Society of America.

Curation as a Form of Rhetoric

My work with The ART of Infertility has shaped how I understand curation as a form of rhetorical and feminist practice. Drawing from Cultural Rhetorics, I approach curation as a way of attending to the relationships among people, stories, objects, places, and communities. Rather than simply presenting artworks or organizing information, I see curation as a form of knowledge-making: selecting, arranging, contextualizing, and creating encounters that can make lived experiences visible and invite new ways of understanding them.

In 2023, I co-edited Infertilities: A Curation, a collection of personal narratives, visual art, and creative writing representing experiences of reproductive loss and infertility. The project brought together community storytelling, creative practice, and scholarship to explore how public-facing genres can create more reciprocal relationships between researchers and the communities with whom they work.

My curatorial work includes In a State of IF, a group exhibition I co-curated with Katherine Gressel in 2026 at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. The exhibition was first conceived in the aftermath of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which had ripple effects beyond abortion access and raised new questions about the legal and political landscape surrounding infertility care and assisted reproduction. The project was further conceptualized following the 2024 Alabama Supreme Court ruling concerning the legal status of frozen embryos, which brought renewed attention to the ways reproductive technologies, family building, and reproductive rights intersect with law and policy.

Bringing together the work of more than 30 artists, In a State of IF explores infertility, reproductive loss, assisted reproduction, and family building. The exhibition considers these experiences not only as deeply personal and emotional, but also as shaped by broader social, cultural, legal, and political conditions. It asks what becomes visible when experiences that are often treated as private are brought into public cultural space, and how art and storytelling can create opportunities to examine the politics of reproduction while fostering connection, conversation, and public engagement.

Current Work

My current work moves between scholarship, advocacy, teaching, curation, and community collaboration. Through this work, I’m developing rhetorical curation as a way of thinking about how we gather and arrange stories, objects, and experiences—and how those arrangements shape what becomes knowable, visible, and possible. I’m developing this work into a book on curation as a rhetorical practice, drawing on my experiences with The ART of Infertility and In a State of IF to consider how curatorial practices can create forms of community knowledge and public engagement. I’m also particularly interested in family formation, reproductive justice, legal and advocacy rhetoric, reproductive rhetoric, and the ethics of reproductive technologies, including questions of data surveillance and reproductive policing.

My scholarship moves between the university and the communities, organizations, and cultural spaces where this work takes shape. I collaborate with artists, advocates, students, nonprofit organizations, and community partners to develop projects that connect research with public life. I believe that people are experts in their own experiences and that meaningful research and public engagement begin with listening to—and building relationships with—the communities whose lives our work touches.

I invite you to explore the site to learn more about my research, writing, teaching, curatorial projects, and community collaborations. Want to connect? Email me at novotnmt@uwm.edu.