Mel Day
About Mel Day
I am a Canadian artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area and I'm also the co-founder of the Wall of Song Project, an art, sport, and civic singing platform. My collaborative practice explores the combined power and expressive possibilities of art, participatory performance, and the rituals of collective singing for women's sport and social change efforts. I have been working to combine remote and live voices together in participatory video installations and live sport stadium, gallery, and cathedral media-based performances for the past decade or so, often with hundreds of participants and a number of affinity partners. Since 2019, I have been collaborating with Dr. Akilah Carter-Francique and the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society, & Social Change, the birthplace of the Olympic Project for Human Rights. My interdisciplinary multi-media work has been shared in exhibitions and events with venues including Provident Credit Union Event Center (San José), The San José Museum of Art (virtually), Grace Cathedral, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Peak Gallery (Toronto), The Trafalgar Hotel (London), Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley). Recently awarded the 2019 Silicon Valley Creates Artist Laureate Nexus Award, I founded an IDEO-Awarded Youth Fellowship in collaboration with the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. I also curate projects exploring love, longing, and the unknown, most recently in San Francisco and Toronto. Residencies include Stanford University’s Experimental Media Arts Lab, Headlands Center for the Arts Alumni New Works Award/UC Berkeley MFA Fellowship, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Schwandorf, Germany) and The Lab (San Francisco). I currently teach at San José State University and hold an MFA from UC Berkeley and a BFA from Queen’s University, Canada with a year’s scholarship exchange to the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.