Heléna Melone (M.A., Interdisciplinary Studies/Dance Therapy from Lesley University) is a Maine-based artist and educator whose connection to her immediate environment informs both her work as a painter and dancer, as well as her work as a teacher.  A juried Maine Arts Commission Arts Educator and international dance instructor and performer who trained extensively throughout the U.S. and in Egypt, Turkey and Spain, she was interviewed for her knowledge of flamenco for the novel “Flamenco Academy,” as well as for Oprah magazine.  Heléna taught and choreographed for 16 years at Phillips Exeter Academy and her work in schools has focused on helping Maine’s 4th-graders learn the hard science of local ecosystems through “Dancescapes,” an intellectual, imaginative, and movement-based interactive process she created for children to experience and learn from both their own bodies and their local environments.  Her work with adults through Creative Empowerment Facilitation (often called “life coaching!”) is also focused on helping others realize & claim their potential through the power of art, interconnection, and personal self-expression.

Living in mid-coast Maine called her back to her roots — to drawing and to her love of the wild woods and the sea.  Drawing free-hand with dye resist, she paints on silk the fluid and potent beauty of the ever-changing natural world, her greatest teacher.  Her paintings are wall hangings, allowed to move in the wind (not adhered to a frame), so as to acknowledge that there is no “boundary between the world and the work; all is a continuous flow of movement and interconnectedness.”