Orbitz travel photographer Melissa Fuller

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Melissa Fuller is the Orbitz Travel Blog’s travel artist of the month. Each week we will feature a series of photographs from her collection. Before we share her photographs, we asked Melissa to share a little about herself.

By Melissa Fuller

I took the sage advice of my corporately employed single mother: “Melissa, I want you to do something you LOVE. It’s not worth it any other way.” And so it became ingrained in my head that work is synonymous with adventuring. And if you can do it making art along the way, then heck, you’re doing all right.

That seed, planted at an early age, was nourished with the developer and fix bath of a shoddy high school dark room and really took root in college, where I studied photography, film and video in tandem with global development. My inclination toward documenting and exploring became the driving force behind what has now become my work, my passion, and my way of meditation. Taking photographs and seeing into different cultures and ways of life not only inspires me to open my eyes wide, but it also helps me to grasp the simplicity of this place and time we are so lucky to be a part of.

Melissa Fuller earned her bachelor of science from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied word and image theory with an emphasis in photography. Her work has been featured in National Geographic’s “There and Back” readers series and for TOMS shoes for tomorrow blog. Melissa has traveled around the United States and abroad as production staff for several networks, including, A&E, VH1, MTV and ABC. See more of her work on her blog.