Journey

Melissa X DeAun

Photographer | Multimedia Storyteller | Educator

I am a photographer and multimedia storyteller based in Seattle, Washington. My work began in photography and has expanded through music documentation, community media, education, and field-based graduate research.

For more than a decade, I have documented musicians, artists, and cultural communities. I work as a music photographer with KEXP and founded Ballard VOX, a community media organization supporting and documenting Seattle's independent music communities.

I am currently completing a Master's degree in Biological Sciences through Miami University's Project Dragonfly Global Field Program. My graduate fieldwork has taken me to Belize, Thailand, and Mongolia, where I have explored relationships among conservation, culture, ecology, civic media, and community.

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MY PRACTICE

My current work asks how storytelling can be practiced more ethically and relationally. I am particularly interested in questions of voice, narrative sovereignty, reflective practice, and socio-ecological justice.

Rather than assuming that a storyteller can objectively explain another person, community, or place, I am developing approaches that make my own position and relationships visible within the work. This has led me toward autoethnographic and reflective storytelling that begins with what I experience, observe, and learn while creating space for others to speak for themselves.

My larger research question is how ethical and relational storytelling might help people reconnect with identity and voice and, through that connection, strengthen relationships with community, place, and the living world.