Melanie is a Philippine-born interdisciplinary artist and designer from New York. In 2015, she went on a search to learn alternative ways of living, away from cities, which brought her to California’s Mojave Desert. Here she immersed herself in earth building and permaculture at the Cal Earth Institute before eventually relocating to the Peruvian Amazon, where she lived three formative years in the town of Puerto Maldonado. Her proximity to the environmental issues and Indigenous realities across the region of Madre de Dios and the Las Piedras River brought new insights and personal experiences that would connect her to the work of Xapiri Ground in 2019, where she has since implemented her creativity and passion for Indigenous culture, traditions, and art through communications, curation, and project development.