Michael Rowe was a visiting lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts, London from 1976–1982 and at Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education from 1973 to 1984. He has been a member of staff at the Royal College of Art since 1984 and is now a Senior Tutor. In 1987 he was made a Fellow. Research into the colouring and patination of metals carried out at Camberwell College of Art with Richard Hughes from 1979 to 1982 led to the publication of the book The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals (1982).
Rowe is a Freeman of the Goldsmiths' Company and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1988 he was winner of the Sotheby's decorative Arts Award and in 1993 was awarded a Japan Foundation Artists Fellowship. In 1998, he was a prizewinner in the European Prize for Contemporary Art and Design-led Crafts organised by the World Crafts Council, and in 2002, he was recipient of the Golden Ring of Honour from the Association of German Goldsmiths, the Gesellschaft fur Goldschmidekunst. A major retrospective of his work Michael Rowe: poetics and geometry was held at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2003. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Buckinghamshire New University in 2004, and an honorary doctorate by Hasselt University, Belgium, in 2010. A monograph on his work, Michael Rowe, by Martina Margetts and Richard Hill, was published in 2003.
