Melissa Hyatt Foss will be the MD Traditions Artist-in-Residence for AY24-25. She will share her tradition and practice with UMBC undergraduate Linehan Artist Scholars (LAS) in three fall-semester sessions, and collaborate on a public presentation at UMBC. During the spring semester, the AiR and LAS students will collaborate to develop a “Teaching Box” teaching materials that will enable art teachers in public schools to introduce their students to the practice, history, and cultural significance of clay instrument making.
Melissa Hyatt Foss is an instrument-maker, musician and composer-performer who co-creates with an ever-growing collection of instruments that she hand-crafts with clay and other natural materials. Her instruments, which are both visual and sonic objects, both sculptural and functional, recreate and reimagine Pre-Columbian sound artifacts of the Americas through the lens of personal narrative and regional mythology.
Melissa received her training in Argentina under the tutelage of composer and educator Alejandro Iglesias Rossi and musicologist and educator Susana Ferreres, and developed her career as a performer, instrument-maker, teaching artist, and researcher for nearly a decade in connection with the National University of Argentina. There she completed her master’s degree in Musical Composition, New Technologies, and Traditional Arts and performed as a soloist for 7 years with the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies. Since returning to the US in 2021, she has developed and delivered bilingual educational programming with communities of all ages in schools, cultural centers, universities and museums.