Melanie Mowinski lives and works in the Berkshires of Massachusetts where she is a professor of art at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA). Mowinski holds an MFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and an MAR from Yale University.
Mowinski balances hyper control & very specific rules with experimental investigations in her letterpress and book art work, often gravitating towards one-of-a-kind books housed in unusual and traditional enclosures. Her books under the imprint PRESS • 29 PRESS are in private and public collections including Williams College, Yale University, Colorado College, Denison University Library, Lafayette College, The Newark Museum, Baylor University, The University of Iowa, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Ohio University, The Free Library of Philadelphia, The Ruth Hughes Collection at Oberlin College, Tate Modern Museum of Art in London, Simon Fraser University, Cornell University, UCLA, USC, Emory University, Lafayette College, Library of Congress, Smithsonian American Art & Portrait Gallery Library and University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In 2017 she completed The 50 Card Project: a year of letterpress cards printed every week from Inauguration Day to the end of 2017. This project was directly inspired by the statement liberty and justice for all. She brings her commitment to civic engagement to collaborative projects, partnerships, and activities in her local, national, and international communities.
She has maintained a daily practice of creating with paper for more than 15 years. This practice forms the foundation of her book Collage Your Life, forthcoming June 2022 from Storey Publishing.
