MELISSA CALLENDER

Melissa Callender is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, yoga teacher, and postpartum doula whose work explores patience, transition, and embodied attention. Working primarily through blind contour drawing and text, her practice centers on slowness as both method and ethic. Offering herself an invitation to remain present with what is unfolding rather than rushing toward resolution.

Drawing from her background in yoga and meditation, Melissa’s work is deeply informed by listening: to the body, to breath, to subtle internal rhythms. Her interdisciplinary approach reflects a longstanding interest in thresholds, thresholds between rest and effort, holding and releasing, certainty and unknowing. Alongside her visual practice, she is a writer whose work often parallels similar themes of care, inner life, and the quiet labor of becoming.

Melissa is a BFA graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied design and woodworking. She now teaches yoga and meditation, and leads workshops that integrate creativity, embodiment, and reflection. Through both her art and teaching, she creates spaces that value process over product and tenderness over mastery, encouraging a softened relationship to attention, time, and imperfection.