Bio
Melanie Elyse Brewster (b. Miami, Florida) is a Greek-American artist, scholar, and practicing psychologist who lives in New York City. Brewster is a Professor in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Columbia University. She earned her PhD from the University of Florida in 2011 and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 2024.
Brewster’s interdisciplinary art and scholarship focuses on stigma and queer futurities—informed by surreal, campy aesthetics that destabilize identity and traditional kinship structures. Specifically, she uses fiber, sculpture, and ceramics to create works that address wild, mythological manifestations of gender and sexuality.
Her research has been featured in media outlets such as CNN, NPR, Vice News, and the CBC, while her art has been exhibited nationally at college and university galleries across the country. Brewster has exhibited in galleries including The CAMP Gallery (Miami), The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn), and La Mama Galleria (NYC) among many others. She has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and a book, Atheists in America, on experiences of marginality and stress in the United States.
Recent art accolades include a solo presentation at Brazosport College and residencies and/or fellowships at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Watershed, and Vermont Studio Center. She has residencies upcoming at ChaNorth and Guttenberg Arts. Brewster won the SVA thesis award and an Alumni Scholarship award for her parafictional work on Wolfmotherhood.
Abbreviated Art CV is available here.
Psychology CV is available here.
Artist Statement
My interdisciplinary work examines the bizarre and mournful paradoxes inherent in contemporary spiritual practices. I focus on nature worship, including plant-human interactions and the desire to ‘rewild’ or be fully consumed by wilderness. Working in sculpture, ceramics, and fiber, I construct maximalist installations and intimate ritual objects that can be used to artificially recreate human-animal kinship structures (i.e., nursing from a Wolfmother) or push us closer to interspecies hybridities (i.e., a woman who becomes an ouroboros from too much yoga). Playing with the idea of ‘spiritual drag’ by using irreverent, over-the-top methods, I explore the effort it takes to stay grounded in our hyper-capitalist era of disconnection.
My work is informed by surrealism, camp, and queer aesthetics, aiming to destabilize traditional identity and relational categories. Inspired by chthonic faiths, I create new mythologies of caregiving and feminist deities that reconnect us with the environment. Through this lens, I build strangely magical worlds—vulnerable and darkly humorous—wherein my subjects try to stay resilient against neoliberal forces that push us away from the ‘natural’ world. I immerse viewers in uncertain moments and ambiguous borderlands: liminal spaces that allow us to open up possibilities for unconventional methods of wellness and kinship.
Installation view of Palo Santo, Candle & Crystal, and Evil Eye masks (2022).
Still from Pandemic Weavings, 2020, performance documentation, Wassaic, NY.