Bio
Melanie Elyse Brewster (b. Miami, Florida) is an artist, scholar, and practicing psychologist who lives and works in New York City. 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 center craft, costume, and performance to destabilize identity. She uses fiber, collage, and assemblage 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, whilst her art has been exhibited nationally at universities and galleries such as The CAMP Gallery (Miami), The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn), and La Mama Galleria (NYC). Brewster 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, an upcoming residency at Vermont Studio Center, and the SVA thesis award for her parafictional work on Wolfmotherhood. Currently she is a licensed psychologist and professor at Columbia University in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology.
Abbreviated Art CV is available here.
Psychology CV is available here.
Artist Statement
My interdisciplinary work examines the bizarre paradoxes inherent in ‘wellness’ and spiritual practices. I focus on nature worship in the Anthropocene, including plant-human interactions and the desire to ‘rewild’ or be fully consumed by wilderness. 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. I work in sculpture and fiber, constructing 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).
My work is informed by both surrealism and camp aesthetics that center performance, costume, and craft to destabilize and queer identity. 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.
Over the Pandemic I Got Really into Plants, 2022, photograph.
Installation view of Palo Santo, Candle & Crystal, and Evil Eye masks (2022) at SVA.
Still from Pandemic Weavings, 2020, performance documentation, Wassaic, New York.