Location: Fairfax, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing
Website: haleymellin.com
Haley Mellin was born in 1983 and grew up in San Anselmo, near Point Reyes in Marin County, California. She earned a BA in Art Practice with a minor in Education from UC Berkeley in 2003, completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 2005, and received a PhD in Visual Culture and Education from NYU’s Steinhardt School in 2012. Early in her training she also studied drawing and painting in Florence, Italy, under the mentorship of Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky.
Alongside her studio practice, Mellin built a parallel career in land conservation. In 2017 she founded Art into Acres, an artist-run nonprofit that channels support from the arts community into permanent, large-scale protection of biodiverse landscapes, including Indigenous-led and community-led conservation areas; the organization has helped secure tens of millions of acres of new protected land. She co-founded the MOCA Environmental Council in Los Angeles and Art and Climate Action in San Francisco (both 2020), and in 2024 co-authored “Conservation Imperatives,” a paper in Frontiers in Science identifying the world’s remaining unprotected sites of irreplaceable biodiversity. Her honors include the Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship at the American Academy in Berlin (2023), the Dorothy Height Distinguished Alumni Award from NYU (2023), and Teiger Foundation Sustainability Grants (2022, 2023, 2026).
Mellin maintains studios in Fairfax, California, in Marin County, and in the New York area. Her work is represented by Dittrich & Schlechtriem in Berlin and has been shown at Giovanni’s Room in Los Angeles and The Journal Gallery in New York, among others. Recent institutional presentations include a solo exhibition at Museo Novecento in Florence (2025) and inclusion in the group exhibition “Utopia. The Right to Hope” at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2025–2026).
Mellin paints and draws almost entirely outdoors, on site, often in the same landscapes she is simultaneously working to protect through Art into Acres — she has described the practice as inseparable from her conservation work, noting that “one hour of observational painting corresponds to about 100 hours of work to protect the land it depicts.” She works exclusively with non-toxic, water-based materials — gouache, watercolor, graphite, plant-based charcoal, and ink — rather than oil paint, often in unheated outdoor studios without electricity. Many works carry geographic coordinates as titles, anchoring each image to the specific place it depicts.
Her paintings and large-scale wall drawings render forests, wetlands, and old-growth wilderness with close observational detail, treating biodiversity itself as subject matter rather than traditional landscape scenery. Recurring bodies of work — including Siamo Natura, Biodiversity and Betadiversity, and Conservation Imperatives — pair the images with texts and research drawn from conservation biologists and Indigenous land stewards, folding scientific and ecological advocacy directly into the exhibition experience.
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