Melissa Borman she/her/hers melissa.a.borman@gmail.com https://www.melissaborman.com/ BIO Melissa Borman is a Minneapolis based photographer and installation artist. Her work addresses the interconnected relationship embedded in using landscape elements as metaphors to depict our human stories and how these depictions shape our ideas of our surroundings. She is particularly interested in how the methods we use to share stories, from fairy tales to social media, impact our collective understanding of the natural world. Melissa’s self-published artist book, A Piece of Dust in the Great Sea of Matter launched September, 2019. TEACHING PHILOSOPHY & MENTORSHIP I am a full-time faculty member in Art and Gender Studies at Century College. I have taught at the University of Colorado at Denver, Creighton University, and the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. In addition, I created and for 15 years taught an interdisciplinary, site- specific summer course at the Burren College of Art in Ireland. As someone who struggled as a first-generation college student, I am a passionate advocate for accessible and equitable art education. As much as I love and admire my community college students, I miss the level of dialog and the challenges of engaging with MFA students and their work. Be it helping with technical challenges, drafting an artist statement, or providing encouragement, I am here to help.