Turns out in this world, some people are supposed to meet.  Melani N. Douglass and I missed each other in college by just a few months.   She ended up transferring from one end of Baltimore’s Beltway to the other, where she finished at Morgan State with a degree in English and Creative Writing.   After finally meeting, we discovered our networks of people crossed lines.

A Baltimore native, she has called DC home since 1999 and firmly planted her roots by buying an old fixer-upper in historic Anacostia in 2004.

With the French lyrics from “Les Nubians” rolling from her laptop, she offers me a tour of her new kitchen and proudly displays the  paint job she has performed on the historic home.

Melani, a history teacher by day, describes herself as a visual and performance artist, but to the lay person that does not begin to describe the artistic talents that she uses.  A poet, photographer, painter, actress, belly dancer – she covers a lot of ground.

Art has been a major focus since childhood. “I grew up in a jazz club,” she says, recalling the days she followed her parents to weekly jazz society performances.   “Phyllis Hyman, the Marsalis brothers – I saw them all growing up.”

She is inspired by the geographic, political and historic nature of the city she now calls home.  “It’s a very rich scene,” she says, describing the District’s art scene.   Her work benefits from the vast resources of the city from the Smithsonian to the National Archives.

“You don’t have to create a body of work from inspiration, you can just use history,” as she has done in her soon-to-be touring paintings of Frederick Douglass.

A member of her high school thespian society, she continued her theater work in college.  In April 2007 she auditioned and was awarded the part of Evalyn in DC playwright Kymone Freeman’s, upcoming independent feature film entitled “Ninevah” which focuses on the future conflicts over the scarcity of water.

“Are you the star?” I ask her somewhat naively, but with high curiosity.

With a look that tells me it would be rude for her to claim to be the star, she gives the facts demonstrating her modesty, “Let’s just put it this way,” she starts, “the film was initially called ‘Evalyn.’”

One of her series of photographs she has titled “Womb and World.”

“It’s a series of trees, that show the feminine side of nature,” she says, describing the collection of black and whites  she quickly pulls up on her laptop.  The photos have titles that include - Thunder Thighs, Venus, Serena, Bumper Girl.  All of the photos make me feel as if I was walking through the woods; and then I do a double take as I feel my eyes adjusting, recognizing the image of a woman’s hips.