Born 1980, Montréal, Canada.
Lives and works between Oakland, California, and Puerto Escondido, Mexico.
Graduated from Lasalle College, Canada with a BA in art and fashion.
Melissa Patenaude is a self-taught artist, creative director, and entrepreneur based between San Francisco/Bay Area and Oaxaca, Mexico. She started her career in Montreal, Canada where she grew up, and moved to Brooklyn, NY when she was 25 where she lived for 10 years. Her skills for color, spatial planning, and symbolism were built from 20+ years of art, fashion, and design.
Melissa’s work focuses on society and self untold rules and boundaries, and our desire as humans to break out of these webs and boxes. Working with different types of media, Melissa creates deep, meaningful work influenced by her strong awareness of the nuances that pervade the human experience. Her passion lies at the intersection of people, culture, and technology, mixed in with the strong commentary around the internal struggles we all face as humans born into societies that don’t feel like ours.
Her journey started studying computer engineering where she developed her love for problem-solving. After some travel and self-reflection, she dove into fashion design, a world where her creativity needs were better met and where her skills for color, illustration, form, and materials were developed. After a 10-year career in fashion, she transitioned into brand, marketing, and product design where she got back in touch with problem-solving, spatial theory, user experiences, and colors. Through a lot of travel, she fell in love with people, culture, and with the idea that we, as humans, are all very different, yet all the same.
Today, Melissa returns to the art world with physical and digital work that expresses the culmination of all these experiences and what she is most curious about: the modern human condition. You can find her curating artist talks and creating dynamic installation work. She enjoys working on paintings, illustrations, murals, custom and personal work, curating the online gallery One___Gallery (@one___gallery) and discovering and helping other artists. Give her a shout @melp___art.