Mia Brownell (born 1971) is an American painter whose work has been described by the Boston Globe art critic Cate McQuaid as "a 21st-century take on the 17th-century genre, pulled off with thrilling technique -- a postmodern fruit cocktail that marries today's fascination with genetics and the building blocks of life with old-style painterly seduction.
Her paintings are in several private, corporate, and public art collections including the National Academy of Sciences.
In 2014, a traveling 10-year survey of her work accompanied a solo exhibition in New York City titled: "Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting: Paintings by Mia Brownell 2003–2013".
Dedicated exhibition catalog essays have been written about her work by scholars: Donald Kuspit, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Kenneth Bendiner, Hanneke Grootenboer, and Darra Goldstein.
Art critic Donald Kuspit said of Brownell's art at a 2010 exhibition: "Brownell’s nature has been 'modernized' and demystified, in that its genetic and cellular basis have been spelled out scientifically, but it remains mysterious—even absurdly miraculous—for it continues to produce, with patient inevitability, the fruits of life.