Melanie Vote grew up in the rural mid-west but has lived in NYC for over 20 years. Her work straddles these two worlds, investigating the complexities of the human-land relationship, the cyclical nature of all life, and the impossibility of permanence. In temperate months she works remotely, painting outside. She is a visual scavenger collecting passages, then returns to the studio to reconstruct layers of a place, weaving them together into open-ended narratives.

She received her BFA from Iowa State University and her MFA in Painting from New York Academy of Art. Vote was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2007 and has been awarded many residencies including The Vermont Studio Center, Jentel in Banner, WY, AHAD in Abu Dhabi, UAE, The Grand Canyon, The Weir Farm program in CT.  Vote teaches at NYAA and has taught at The New School, NJCU and Pratt Institute. Additionally, Vote has been a visiting artist at numerous schools including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.

Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally. In New York at  Flowers Gallery, The Lodge Gallery, Sloan Fine Art and DFN Gallery. Additionally her work has been shown at the Indiana Contemporary Art Center, Jenkins-Johnson Gallery of CA, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, with solo exhibitions at Galleria Farina in Miami and Hionas Gallery of New York, The Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea, and at ADAH, Abu Dhabi. Her work was was on view at DFN Project in 2023 in a two-person exhibition Concurrence, 2023 and most recently for her second solo exhibition at Equity Gallery, Consulting with the Light Eaters in May of 2025.

 Selected Artworks