Bio

Melissa English Campbell Melissa English Campbell (b. 1969, San Francisco) is a fiber based visual artist whose work bridges the tactile discipline of weaving with the fluid expressiveness of painting. Using a large floor loom to weave tapestries of painted warp, Melissa’s work explores the tension between structure and disruption. 

She was raised in a landscape of migrations across countries, languages, and religious traditions. Each move offered fresh curiosities but also unfamiliar social codes to navigate, sparking a lifelong interest in the visual patterns and languages that build understanding. The impact of movement and adaptation is embedded in her methods: woven structures shift and relocate painted images; patterns disrupt and reassemble, exploring how meaning and memory are built, broken, and reformed.

In the studio, Melissa’s process begins with a warp of white yarn threaded through the loom in taut, orderly rows. Onto this substrate, she paints portraits, landscapes, and abstract forms drawn from her present life in Ohio and memories of her meandering formative years. Once painted, the yarn is woven. At the loom, each strand lifts collectively with the harness but shifts individually within its heddle, subtly misaligning the image. The shuttle’s pass anchors the yarns into new positions, locking distortions into place and imprinting a geometric weave pattern across the surface.

While Melissa guides the paint, the loom’s motion, and the shuttle’s rhythm, the shifting imagery introduces an element of unpredictability, requiring her to relinquish control and embrace chance in the making process. Her practice becomes a meditation on movement and change—how materials shift, how meanings migrate, and how, through the act of making, new ways of seeing can emerge.

Melissa has a B.S. in Environmental Design from the University of California, Davis, and an MFA in Studio Arts from Kent State University.

Her artwork has been exhibited globally, including at the Royal Albert Museum in the UK, Seoul, South Korea; Como, Italy; and New South Wales, Australia. Nationally, Melissa’s work has been shown at galleries such as Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville North Carolina, at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus, Ohio; Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois; San Jose Museum of Textiles in California; Columbus Museum of Craft, New Bedford Art Museum in Massachusetts; Museum of Texas Tech University; Hand Weaving Museum in New York; Troppus Gallery in Kent, Ohio. She has also participated in the CAN Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, The Other Art Fair in Chicago and her work has appeared in journals such as Surface Design Magazine and FiberArt Now.  She is a recipient of the Award of Excellence from the Ohio Council for the Arts.

Melissa now lives and works in Ohio.