Baker Artist Portfolios

Melissa Sutherland Moss (b. Brooklyn, NY) is a Costa Rican American interdisciplinary artist and professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her work spans collage, painting, video, sound, text, performance, and installation. Grounded in research and personal history, her practice explores the intersections of landscape, identity, and migration—particularly through the lens of Afro-Caribbean and diasporic narratives. She considers landscape not only as geography, but also as a cultural and historical archive shaped by memory, dislocation, and transformation.
Through layered processes of accumulation, erasure, and excavation, Moss creates work that navigates the tension between visibility and concealment, drawing on archival materials, inherited stories, and speculative reconstructions. She engages the body as both subject and site—interrogating how it holds and performs history, especially in relation to themes of colonialism, access, gender, and belonging.
Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Biggs Museum of American Art and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships with MASS MoCA (2025), ArtCrawl Harlem, the Chrysalis Institute for Emerging Artists, the Alliance of Artist Communities, and Zea Mays Printmaking.
Her practice and perspective have been featured in publications such as Forbes, Black Enterprise, Essence, Modern Luxury, and Refinery29. Moss lives and works in Baltimore.