Melissa Simon-Hartman

Melissa Simon-Hartman is a British multidisciplinary artist and world builder of Trinidadian and Ghanaian heritage whose practice explores identity, cultural memory, ritual, and the evolving relationship between ancestral knowledge and imagined futures. Drawing upon her Caribbean and West African heritage, and the visual and performative traditions of masquerade, she creates immersive works that examine how histories, traditions, and material cultures can be reinterpreted through a contemporary and speculative lens.

Working across wearable art, costume, sculpture, installation, textiles, and image-making, Simon-Hartman approaches the body as both a site of storytelling and a vehicle for transformation. Her practice combines traditional and experimental processes with unconventional and repurposed materials, creating richly layered forms that move between art, fashion, performance, and cultural expression. Through this multidisciplinary approach, she constructs new visual worlds in which heritage is not treated as static, but as a living language capable of transformation, reinvention, and imagining new futures.