Melissa Powers

Born in Pennsylvania, Melissa Powers is an artist, educator, and archivist based in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and a BFA from Columbia College Chicago. Her interdisciplinary practice spans photography, projection, reflection, fibers, and installation, often incorporating broken lenses as both medium and metaphor. Melissa's work explores themes of intimacy, grief, and the unseen, creating spaces that evoke the emotional complexities of absence, memory, and perception.

I am a photographer and multidisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia, working with projection, reflection, fibers, and photography to explore themes of intimacy, grief, and the unseen. My practice seeks to capture the intangible—those emotional and psychological states that are lost before they are found. The “unseen” and the act of “unseeing” are central to my work the implicit rather than explicit. I am drawn to the gaps between perception and reality—the moments we overlook or fail to fully understand. Projection and reflection allow me to evoke these distortions, while fiber work serves as a tactile metaphor for memory, loss, and connection.

I recieved my MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where I developed a practice centered on visual storytelling that invites viewers to reconsider what they see and how they feel. My work is a space for intimacy, reflection, and to question what is unseen.

PA