Melissa Mejía

Biography

She was born on September 1, 1979 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she still lives and works in his studio.

She was a restless child and her mother often told her that she will never forget the look of fascination on her face when she put a pencil in his hand and began scribbling lines on a piece of paper. She said it was the only thing that kept her calm.

She is self-taught in drawing. She practiced taking portraits when posed for her, and also copied things from books, magazines, movies, and nature.

At 15 years old, after brief painting classes with a Dominican artist, she was selling portraits, still lifes and landscapes. On the other hand, she also painted things that inspired her and made her own clothes.

Because she never stopped creating, she realized that she felt emotionally torn between the things that really inspired her and the things she could sell. She will find the freedom to unify the two and do it with her own voice. She wanted to be an artist and she wanted it to be her profession. She felt that she needed guidance to achieve it and she thought she could get it into an art school, but she was discouraged from going because it was considered at the time an unstable profession and unsuitable for making a decent living. Additionally, she addresses the taboos about sex and drugs that surround art schools and the very moral education where she comes from.

She had to change careers several times during college, work hard and persevere to earn a living and the support of her family, to finally go to Art School at age 23.

During the two years at the School she had a deep connection with her work through self-portraits and it was the starting point of the style that I have been developing since
so.

In 2005 she graduated with honors in Fine Arts and Illustration from Altos el Chavón, School of Design. She has never stopped working on developing her own style, which is constantly evolving. She has worked with several international art galleries and has participated in numerous collectives and art fairs. The only time she stopped creating was when she struggled with substance abuse in her late twenties and early thirties. It was a very sad time for her because, among other losses, she lost connection with herself and with her work, she could not paint..

In 2015 she decided on a life of sobriety and the years since then have been like a capsule of her entire life process as an artist. She struggled the first few years of her recovery and because of all the anxiety she was processing she found it difficult to hold a paintbrush for more than a few minutes. Once again, she persisted and managed to integrate her life experiences.