Veronica Melendez is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and publisher. Her work centers the afterlives of Civil War, migration, and Mesoamerican Indigenous imaginaries. Her projects weave between original photography, archival imagery, collage, oral history, and stop motion animation. Having ancestral roots in Guatemala and El Salvador and growing up in Washington D.C., she is constantly faced with the complex ideation of home in a city that is deeply tied to her family’s history of displacement.
Melendez is a founder of La Horchata, an arts publication highlighting artists with Central American roots. She was selected for the 2018 Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award for Documentarians of the American South by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. And was most recently in residence at the Studios at Mass MoCA. She is currently a Professor of Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
While at MacDowell she used her time to edit audio, including oral histories, and start the final phase of piecing together an experimental nonlinear film centering the migration stories of her grandmother and her eight daughters from Guatemala City to Washington D.C.
