Melanie Yazzie

Melanie Yazzie (born 1966 on the Navajo Nation in Arizona) is a Navajo printmaker, sculptor, and professor of art at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she has taught since 1993. Working in monotype, etching, linocut, and cast aluminum, Yazzie creates densely layered works filled with Navajo women, horses, dogs, birds, and the texture of everyday domestic and ceremonial life. Her work has an intimate, personal quality — rooted in specific cultural knowledge and lived experience — that gives it emotional warmth alongside its conceptual substance. She has exhibited internationally, with work in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, the Denver Art Museum, and major private and public collections. She has been recognized with fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and other major arts organizations.