Melissa Sutherland Moss '25

Part-Time Faculty, First Year Experience /

Melissa Sutherland Moss (b. Brooklyn, NY) is a Costa Rican American interdisciplinary artist whose work spans collage, painting, video, sound, text, performance, and installation. Grounded in research and personal history, her practice explores the intersections of landscape, identity, and migration—particularly through the lens of Afro-Caribbean and diasporic narratives. She considers landscape not only as geography, but as a cultural and historical archive shaped by memory, dislocation, and transformation.

Through layered processes of accumulation, erasure, and excavation, Moss creates work that navigates the tension between visibility and concealment, drawing on archival materials, inherited stories, and speculative reconstructions. She engages the body as both subject and site—interrogating how it holds and performs history, especially in relation to themes of colonialism, access, gender, and belonging.

Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Biggs Museum of American Art and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships with ArtCrawl Harlem, the Chrysalis Institute for Emerging Artists, the Alliance of Artist Communities, and Zea Mays Printmaking. She will attend the MASS MoCA residency in January 2026.

Her practice and perspective have been featured in Forbes, Black Enterprise, Essence, Modern Luxury, and Refinery29. Moss recently completed her MFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she is also an Adjunct Professor. She divides her time between New York and Baltimore.

In this sculptural, photographic, and performance series I explore the duality of my body as both subject and object. I consider the conflicting identities that emerge as I travel between worlds and become both observer and the observed. I’m especially interested in examining how we present ourselves within various environments, and how that display sometimes differs from our internal sense of self. I use my body to create an intimate connection with an inanimate sculpture, inviting viewers to consider their own relationships with themselves and their surroundings. + Enlarge

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