About

Melissa Falconett is an artist based in New York working primarily in textiles, embroidery and drawing. She grew up in Southwest Indiana before moving to Nashville, where she became an active exhibiting artist with Untitled Artist's Group and Plowhaus Gallery, later serving two years on the Untitled Artist's Group board of directors.

She went on to earn a BFA in graphic design from University of Evansville and an MFA in Design from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she taught interdisciplinary studio courses through the school's Center for Art & Public Life. Her courses partnered with community groups on site-specific installations that surfaced hidden narratives and memory within spaces, objects, and even culinary dishes — an early instance of using different materials to surface unseen work within a place or process — themes that continue to interest her today.

Alongside her studio practice, Melissa spent more than two decades as a designer and design leader in corporate technology environments, building systems meant to feel seamless to the people using them — an experience that now shapes her studio practice.

She turned to embroidery for its slowness: a process that can't be rushed or undone without leaving a trace, and a craft long dismissed as decorative women's work even when it held households and communities together.

"Has the pen or pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle?"

— Olive Schreiner