Melanie Woody Nguyen

Melanie Woody Nguyen is a PhD candidate studying contemporary American art with Dr. Joshua Shannon. Her research interests center on ecology and its intersections with gender and race in American art, broadly considered, of the postwar period. Her work explores the ways in which artists have responded to the overwhelming changes in our understanding
of the natural world over the past 60 years.

Her dissertation, titled Embodied Ecologies: Performance Art and Environmentalism, 1970-1990, explores the work of U.S. artists who used performance strategies to address environmental concerns. Its three case studies, Ana Mendieta, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Maren Hassinger, each complicate narratives of postwar environmental art and U.S.
environmentalism more broadly.

She has presented her work at conferences sponsored by organizations including the College Art Association, the Association of Historians of American Art, and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

In academic year 2020-2021, she was the University of Maryland Museum Fellow at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She is currently serving as registrar and curatorial assistant at the University of Maryland Art Gallery, where she is the inaugural curator of the gallery’s Video in The Atrium (ViTA) series. In spring 2024, she will be in residence at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art as a Tyson Scholars fellow.

Her master's thesis examined the work of Cuban-American performance artist Ana Mendieta in an ecocritical context, specifically through the lens of the new materialisms. Prior to enrolling at the University of Maryland, she worked as the Assistant to the Executive Director at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.