For the last 22 years, Melissa Wilkinson has served as an academic, teaching at various academic institutions and workshops throughout the country. She received her BFA in painting from Western Illinois University in 2002 then went on to receive her MFA in painting from Southern Illinois University in 2006. Her work has been featured in wide reaching publications throughout the country including three editions of New American Paintings, The Curator’s Salon, and The Manifest Drawing Annual four times. She has shown in various galleries nationally and internationally including South Korea, Canada, India, and Art Basel Miami and has won numerous awards throughout her career. She has won several fellowships and grants including the Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship in Painting in 2012, a Middle East Studies Grant to create an image archive in Israel in 2016, and a National Women in the Arts Grant to do the same at the Smithsonian in 2019. She has conducted workshops at the Arkansas Art Center, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Mass, and the Anderson Ranch Center in Snowmass Colorado. She is represented by OnCenter Gallery in Provincetown, MA. Her work is amongst private collections throughout the country and abroad. She hikes regularly, enjoys making homemade pasta, and enjoys kitchen experiments in fermentation that sometimes fail abysmally, and is in bed by 9pm at the latest. She holds her studio and home in the lower Hudson Valley in Warwick, New York and serves as art faculty at St John Fisher University in Rochester.