Dr. Melissa Warak - Faculty Biography
Dr. Melissa Warak specializes in the relationship of music and sound to art of the twentieth century. Dr. Warak is a proud Texan and a native of Houston. She earned a B.A. in English literature and art history from Vanderbilt University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Warak teaches all of the modern and contemporary art history in the Department of Art at UTEP, including courses on Modernism and global contemporary art; Texas art; art and identity; women in art; art of the United States; a history of performance art; and several courses on the relationship between art and science. Her current research focuses on the ways that visual artists from the mid-fifties to late sixties employed musical models in their work and she is writing a book about contemporary sound art, titled Sonic Sculpture and the Performative Impulse: Sounding Things Out, under contract with Routledge. She is a specialist on the sculpture of the Greek kinetic artist Takis and has contributed essays on his work to the book Energies in the Arts (MIT Press, 2019) and to the catalog for the Takis retrospective at the Tate Modern (2019).
Dr. Warak is a senior scientist on the large Drylands Critical Zone grant through the National Science Foundation (2020-2025, housed in the Department of Earth and Environmental Resource Sciences at UTEP), on which she focuses on art and the environment as part of the Broader Impacts education and outreach team. She is also a 2022-2023 faculty fellow in the Mellon-funded UTEP/EPCC Humanities Collaborative, for which she leads a research project titled “From Access to Acceptance: The Role of Disability in Art.” Other research interests include the history of abstraction, the history of ceramics, spirituality in modern and contemporary art, images of horses, science and technology in art, and disability representation in art. Her research and writing have been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Research Institute, the Royal Music Association of the United Kingdom, The Menil Collection in Houston, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Galleries, the Tate Modern, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Kress Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, among others.
