Melissa Goldman

Education

BA Harvard University

MArch Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

Biography

From crafting new tools and materials to designing and building 1:1 prototypes or giant moving creatures, Melissa has an excitement for making at all scales. She joined UVA in 2011 as the Fabrication Lab Manager, and has grown both the FabLab spaces and team with full time staff and student Crew. The FabLab includes spaces in Campbell Hall, Milton Airfield, and the Allied Street Research Space. She teaches seminars in the Department of Architecture on digital fabrication, interdiscplinary making, and state of the art construction technology.

Her work connects her to other makers across Grounds, Charlottesville, and beyond, collaborating with multiple departments, other academic shop managers, and professional fabricators and researchers. She is a co-founder of UVA's MakerGrounds, the network of shops, labs, and makerspaces open to the UVA community. She served for six years on the Board of Directors and as Communications Officer for the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, and is actively involved in the academic shop manager community called the Student Shop Managers Consortium. She has also served on the UVA Staff Senate Executive Council, was one of the founders of the UVA Chairs Summit, and is one of the founding and current board members of the Cville Tool Library.

With her colleagues in Drama and Studio Art, she co-founded The Stan Winston and Steven Warner Festival of the Moving Creature which is both a series of design-build classes as well as a parade and festival of large creature puppets under the mentorship of Hollywood and local artists. In 2013, she helped produce a short film about the first Festival called "The Art of the Moving Creature," shown at the Virginia Film Festival. She has published her work on Ferrostructures, a novel construction technique with industrial robots, and various class build projects throughout the semesters.

Melissa has her Masters of Architecture degree from Columbia GSAPP, where she was bit by the digital fabrication bug, and her BA in English from Harvard, where she immersed herself in theatrical set and puppet design. When not in the FabLab, she officiates roller derby with the Charlottesville Derby Dames.