about
Melissa Guerrero is a Venezuelan/American photographer who works as a Photography educator at an elementary and online workshops while being a commercial photographer and doing volunteer work in the photography field. She lives and works in Miami, Florida. She has studied photography at Roberto Mata School Of Photography in Miami, and continues her education to ensure her students are up to date in photographic concepts and experimentation. She is a single parent of two children being brought up in Miami.
Artist Statement
My work investigates how identity is constructed and destabilized through memory, loss, and inherited narratives of womanhood. Through analog and experimental processes: mordançage, lumen prints, film soup, and image transfer. I physically alter photographic materials, allowing images to erode, fracture, and re-emerge. This material instability mirrors emotional states shaped by grief, limerence, and the dissolution of family structures.
In Limerence Reverie, I examine obsession and temporal distortion through self-portraiture and symbolic still life, incorporating foraged elements such as shells, fossils, and organic matter. These objects function as emotional artifacts; evidence of attachment, rupture, and survival. In Everyone in Florida Has a Pool, I explore the tension between idealized domestic life and lived experience, using personal and vernacular imagery to question inherited myths of marriage, femininity, and belonging.
My practice positions photography as both witness and participant, an unstable surface where images are not fixed but continuously negotiated. By embracing degradation and transformation, I seek to create a visual language that does not resolve grief, but sustains it. Offering a space where identity can shift, endure, and be reimagined.
Melissa Guerrero is a Miami-based Venezuelan photographer and teaching artist. Her practice merges analog and experimental processes—including film photography, mordançage, lumen prints, and image transfers—to explore memory, grief, and constructed identity. Rooted in personal experience, her work examines womanhood, single motherhood, and the influence of cultural narratives on intimacy and belonging. Guerrero’s long-term projects, Everyone in Florida Has a Pool and Limerence Reverie, combine self-portraiture, still life, and vernacular imagery. She teaches photography to youth and emerging artists, emphasizing visual literacy and personal storytelling as tools for agency and transformation.