Artist and educator Melanie Johnson creates large-scale figurative drawings and paintings that explore psychological narrative themes, such as the relationship between flora, fauna, and the female figure.

In 2025, Johnson started a three-year artist residency at Studios Inc, a nonprofit organization and gallery in Kansas City, Missouri. She told assistant gallery manager Jaede Bayla that she considers her work “theatrical spaces like a stage or a diorama.”

“The viewer needs to be able to engage with the space. It allows for this to unfold over a longer period of time,” she says. “There's the immediacy of the space itself, but like when you sit out in the woods, the longer you’re there, the more you notice.”

Johnson, a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Central Missouri, has exhibited her artwork locally, nationally, and internationally.