Melanie Yazzie

professor, multimedia art, University of Arizona

Navajo artist Melanie Yazzie graduated from Arizona State University in 1990 with a bachelor's degree in studio arts and entered graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She pursued printmaking with a passion becoming a beginning, advanced and intermediate printmaking instructor at CU to pay for school. After receiving her master of fine arts degree in printmaking in 1993, Yazzie started to feel the pull on her heartstrings from the reservation. She wanted to live in a place between Colorado and the Navajo Nation. So she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and became an art instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Yazzie is now back at the University of Colorado, where she is an associate professor of art. She's exhibited her work in New Zealand, France, Russia, Canada, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland and South Africa.