Melissa Joseph

(St. Mary's, Pennsylvania, 1980 - )

American

Melissa Joseph (born 1980, St. Marys, Pennsylvania) is a New York-based artist whose practice explores themes of memory, family history, and cultural inheritance through the medium of needle felting. Born to a mother with Irish roots from Pittsburgh and a father who immigrated from Kerala, India, Joseph grew up in rural Western Pennsylvania navigating a biracial, bicultural identity in a community where such unions were uncommon. She has described herself as being made not of two halves, but two wholes (a formulation that she credits to writer Jassa Ahluwaliathat), which shaped Joseph’s abiding interest in how identity is formed at the intersections of family, place, and material culture.
Joseph earned an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2018, where her MFA program was run by Haitian artist Didier William, a formative influence on her focus on family and diasporic identity. Trained as both a textile designer and a painter, Joseph held a nine-month residency at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn in 2019, during which she took up needle felting—a discovery she has described as transformative. She has since participated in residencies at Artpace San Antonio, the Museum of Arts and Design, Dieu Donné, Fountainhead, the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, among others.
Joseph’s work has been collected by the Brooklyn Museum, ICA Miami, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Jeffrey Deitch Projects, ICA San Francisco, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the Delaware Contemporary, Woodmere Art Museum, and Rockefeller Center’s inaugural Art in Focus exhibition, among many other venues. She has been featured in Artforum, Artnet News, ARTNews, Vogue, Le Monde, Hyperallergic, and Architectural Digest, and was named to The Artsy Vanguard 2025. She is represented by Margot Samel Gallery and Charles Moffett Gallery

New York, New York

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