Melissa Messina

Melissa Messina

Melissa Messina is a U.S.-based arts professional who has developed stimulating exhibitions, dynamic site-specific projects, and engaging public education programs both independently and in leadership positions with museums and nonprofit arts organizations. For the past 20 years, her work with regional, national and international artists has been presented throughout the U.S. in Atlanta, Kansas City, Miami, New York, New Orleans, Richmond, Savannah and Washington, D.C., as well as in Bermuda, France and Hong Kong. She has lectured and published widely, and her research has been supported by Creative Time and the Andy Warhol Foundation, as well as through fellowships at the Stuart A. Rose Library at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

In addition to serving select public and private clients, she is the curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate. She has also recently served as guest curator at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Visual Arts Center of Richmond, and New Orleans Museum of Art, and co-curated the 2018 and 2020 Bermuda Biennials. In 2017, she co-curated Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, an intergenerational exhibition of 21 black women abstract artists that traveled from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.