Davy Mellado
@davymellado

I grew up inside a multi-million dollar megachurch, which is a stranger sentence to write than it is to have lived. I studied architecture in college, but that didn't last long. I dropped out of college to "join the workforce" and found myself writing industry leading social media content in Los Angeles. Somewhere in that early mess, I picked up a camera and never really put it down.

Post-college, I’ve worked on things you’ve probably seen without knowing I was part of them. Campaigns for Hershey, Cadbury, Reese’s. Photography with National Geographic. I started a company called CLR Wear that solved the problem of mass producing custom-fit clothing with an algorithm. I completed a Masters at Johns Hopkins on how bias works; not to eliminate it, but to understand it as a kind of gravity you can steer with.

On the side (or maybe in the middle, hard to tell anymore) I make fine art photographs using slow processes like gum bichromate and light painting. I write essays on Substack about pragmatism and critical optimism and what it means to try to be a person on purpose. I read a lot of Dewey and Hannah Arendt and think about juxtaposition a lot.

If there’s a thread through all of it, I think it’s this: I don’t really believe in the split between anything in life. Whether that be commerce and art, or the sacred and the ordinary, or between rigor and warmth. The best work I’ve seen (and the work I try to make) treats those as a fluctuating relationship. A candy bar campaign can be genuinely artistic. An website can be life-changing. Philosophy can be pedestrian.

I live in Media, Pennsylvania. I’m open to talking about pretty much anything if you feel passionate about it. If you’ve read this far, thanks. That’s more attention than most bios deserve.