Ms. Melanie Hensch was born in San Francisco in 1978. After migrating from the Bay Area to Salinas to Fresno to Santa Clarita, she eventually made it to Santa Barbara where she went to the University of California, Santa Barbara to study art and writing. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Art Studio. Her main practicing includes abstract writing and spoken performance, digital print and video. In her writing and artwork, Melanie strives to build an inner structure that ignores real time and dwells in the spaces of the subconscious world. Her vivid dreams create a bizarre and plentiful resource which constructs this internal/eternal habitat of the subconscious state. They also provide a foundation from which she builds a barrier against time's pursuit which, to her, is simultaneously a consuming horror and a dead-end obsession.
Melanie is also a graphic artist who especially has a penchant for graphics in the music, radio and magazine industry. She has experience in ad production, web design, digital print and photography, art direction and logo design. In accordance with her love of music, Melanie has also written many published music reviews focusing on a multitude of underrepresented genres: underground Hip Hop, electronic, funk, jazz, etc. Melanie's strong knowledge of noncommercial music and artists is mainly due to her work in the independent radio station KCSB in Santa Barbara for which she worked as Program Director for three years and produced and DJed her radio program, The Horn of Plenty, for five years. In addition to these endeavors, Melanie also sat on panels for a Hip Hop conference in Santa Barbara and for the College Music Journal conference in 2000.
Another art form Melanie has chosen to take on is performing her written poetry. Her pieces deal with the disengagement of pop culture, political protest, the roots of rhythm and, once again, her obsession with and fear of time. In 2000, she won first place in the annual Santa Barbara poetry slam after which she went on to perform at the Santa Barbara Reel Loud festival and the Santa Barbara-based Cinergy, a biyearly art and film festival. She has also opened for such acts as Medusa, Spearhead and DJs Manabu and Inti. Melanie continues to write pieces and perform on a regular basis in the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles areas. Currently, Melanie resides in the LA area where she freelances, writes, performs, hangs out and makes art.
