She’s authored countless exhibition catalogs, art reviews, essays, as well as the bi-lingual children's

poetry volume, Cuando Palabras Suenan: When Words Dream, undertaken with the Mexican Consul, L.A., and over the years served as editor and contributing editor to Sculpture, Fabric, Artscene, Visual Art Source, to name a few.

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In Summer 2022, she contributed the lead essay to a major solo exhibition of LA-based activist artist Kim Abeles for the Fresno Museum of Art and continues to contribute regularly to the New York-based digital publication Introspective. In 2021 she co-organized a 60-year retrospective of sculpture by Bruce Beasley, with a major catalogue at Grounds for Sculpture, New Jersey. In 2019 she helped to organize A New Direction at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. In 2018 she curated Asia/LA—LA/Asia at the ARA Arts Center, Seoul, Korea, including artists like John Baldessari and Masami Teraoka.

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Other international/national exhibitions include Critical Connections, and Forms of the Formless, installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Beijing and Teda Modern Art Museum, Nanjing; Framing Abstraction at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Some City Angels, an overview of LA contemporary art held in conjunction with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time at Edward Cella Art + Architecture.

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At Otis College of Art and Design, Marlena Donohue oversees and teaches Art History Honors classes. She co-teaches the Uniquely Abled class, in which Otis students from all majors work and professionally exhibit with uniquely abled adult artists from the Exceptional Children’s Foundation. Additionally, she co-developed and teaches the Fine Arts Sophomore Seminar series, linking a critique of the Western philosophical canon to concrete studio and current world issues.

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Marlena Doktorczyk-Donohue has lectured at Pepperdine University, Mount St. Mary's College, the Cal State Universities, and UCLA.