Melany Dierks was born in Caracas, Venezuela January 22, 1983. In 2007 she received her BFA in Communication Arts from Otis College of Art and Design and established herself as a graphic designer and storyboard artist. A few years after giving birth in 2013, she received her MFA from Otis in 2016, with a focus on painting. She moved to Long Beach in late 2016 and juggled dancing, tattooing and painting, spanning from commissions on canvas to murals through 2020. She currently lives in Long Beach established as a working artist in the fields of paint and tattoo. Her work is defined by an obsessive process of rendering, refusing categorization and instead embraces surrealistic approaches that generate new modes of working by overlapping landscapes, challenging the limits of subject matter and composition, investigating image making and perception. She structures her paintings by presenting signs, juxtapositions and interactions lifted from high art, pop culture with the autobiographical also playing a role.