photo: Tom Jenkins

Melinda Klayman, who usually goes by the surname "Klayperson," was born in New York during the Nixon administration. In 1979, she moved to California, where she lost her thick Long Island accent and perfected her beach bunny imitation. After college at UC Santa Cruz, where she double majored in studio art and art history, she moved to NYC, where she worked at College Art Association and got very expensive haircuts. To continue her cultural immersion, she moved to the undisputed art capitol of the world, Texas, where she entered the University of Texas at Austin. She split up her graduate studies with a year in Big D, where she was a curatorial intern at the Dallas Museum of Art by day, and Dominatrix Mistress Sophia by night. After graduate school, Melinda vowed to never mix herself in the ugly world of art history ever again, and moved to Hollywood to become a star. Instead of stardom, she instead spent over two years suffering through auditions, producing unwatched performances, and going rapidly broke, at which point she fell back on her lucrative career as an art historian and got a job at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Meanwhile, she taught herself web design and collaborated on developing an on-line computer game called Anime Noir, which rapidly gained notoriety among a small crowd of artsy pervo geeks. Then Melinda was sought out by the National University of Singapore to work on a Cyberart Research Initiative and consume vast quantities of tropical fruit. Upon returning to the States, Melinda moved to the San Francisco Bay area and became Director of Development and Communications for Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Melinda lives in Oakland, runs very slow marathons, and occasionally pretends to be a rock star.