Wedding Artworks is the fine art and design studio of award-winning artist and calligrapher Melissa Dinwiddie. With a background in modern dance and academia, Melissa picked up a calligraphy pen in 1995 and discovered a passion that soon went on to become a career. Not long after diving into the world of pens, ink, paint and brushes, Melissa started receiving commissions from private clients for projects as diverse as poems, testimonials, ketubot (Jewish marriage contracts), invitation design, logo and web design. Many of these commissions were for ketubot, and in 2001, in order to make her wedding artwork accessible to more couples, Melissa produced her first giclée print, Tree of Life ketubah. Soon couples were asking for more print designs, and her ketubah prints became a larger and larger part of her business, which she named Ketubahworks.
In 2005 Melissa channeled her love of paper and design into a line of wedding invitations designed to coordinate with her ketubot, becoming the first ketubah artist to offer matching custom invitations. In 2009 she added matching silk chuppah canopies, and also had her calligraphy digitized into fonts which now grace her ketubah designs, making it possible to offer custom texts with much of the warmth of hand lettering, but without the cost.
As the product of an interfaith family, Melissa has always taken special pleasure in creating sacred ketubah documents for couples who have historically been denied access to this traditional art form: interfaith couples, gay and lesbian couples, non-Jewish couples. As more couples from all kinds of traditions and backgrounds came to her looking for ketubah-like wedding certificates, Melissa created a new site, Wedding Artworks, to offer her art to the wider public.
Melissa is much sought-after as a teacher and has taught calligraphy and book arts at workshops and conferences across the US. She is also a talented jazz singer and songwriter (read more and listen to tracks at www.melissasings.com), and is trained as an instructor of vinyasa yoga. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Melissa runs her business from a large bedroom in her quiet townhouse, sharing her workspace with her professional writer sweetheart (yes, they truly share both work- and living spaces!) and two cats. In her rare spare time she enjoys dancing Argentine tango.
