Melissa Boyajian
August 2012
Melissa Boyajian is an emerging artist working in photography, video, installation and performance art residing in Boston, MA. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2009 and her BFA from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in 2003. Her work encompasses issues of post-colonial identity, cultural erasure, gender queerness, the control of knowledge as power and interpersonal power dynamics.
Boyajian is a member of the artist collective Queering Yerevan located in Yerevan, Armenia. She is a contributor to the blogs Queering Yerevan and Off the Wall: Critical Reviews of History Exhibit Practice in an Age of Ubiquitous Display sponsored by the National Council on Public History. She was Assistant Professor of Photography, Media Arts and Design at the recently closed Chester College of New England. Boyajian will be spending the next academic year working with NGO's Pink and the Women's Resource Center, in Yerevan, Armenia.
Boyajian has exhibited her work in MA, PA, MD, NM, NY, Washington, D.C., Tuscany, Italy, Helsinki,
Finland and Yerevan, Armenia. Her most recent exhibitions have included: "Congratulations! You Have Been Rejected!" at Howard Art Project, Dorchester, MA, "The Celebration: Women's History Month," at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, “Sexy Beast: the Body and Identity” UMass Lowell, Lowell, MA, “Queer Me: NYC 2011,” NYC, NY, "In Between: (re)Negotiating Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality" at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA and "Queering Translation: An Art Intervention" in Yerevan, Armenia
