thirdspacearts
Melissa Raman Molitor, ATR-BC, LCPC
EN
EN
ES

Life is not what you alone make it.
Life is the input of everyone who touches your life and every experience that enters it.
We are all part of one another.
Yuri Kochiyama
Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become, what we are at this moment. - Nick Joaquín


I am a first generation South Asian Pacific Islander American of Filipino and Indian descent, a cisgender able-bodied woman, a survivor of violent trauma, a US citizen, the daughter of immigrants navigating privilege and discrimination in a society that sees me as a perpetual foreigner, a descendant of healers, a working mother to mixed race children in a society that will persecute them for who they are and who they choose to love, an activist whose professional practice involves the visual, performative and culinary arts as a vehicle for disruption, solidarity, healing, and care, an educator and social practitioner dedicated to working with young people in the fight against discrimination and the creation of a society that is equitable, and an artist and scholar in terms not defined by a white, colonial, patriarchal, academic system, but by women storytellers, cultural weavers and social framers.
Through my work I seek to create third spaces as a form of healing justice
in my community. These spaces exist in between and outside of the 'norm' and
utilize the arts to center stories that are often silenced or go unheard.
What is Third Space Arts?