Melaine Ferdinand-King is a cultural producer, writer, and curator based in Providence, Rhode Island, whose work moves at the intersection of theory, archives, and the radical possibilities of cultural production across the Americas and the African diaspora.

Her research and creative practice explore how Afrodiasporic and feminist artists and thinkers have wielded countercultural strategies, improvisation, and aesthetic experimentation to forge alternative ways of being and seeing — what she theorizes as "Black wayfinding." Her dissertation, Afrosurrealism and the Art of Black Wayfinding, is among the first scholarly works to map the aesthetic politics of the Black surrealist tradition, drawing on Caribbean modernism, the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary art.

Melaine is the Inaugural Curator of the African American Museum of Rhode Island, where she recently opened Welcome to the Neighborhood: Black Providence in Art and Archives (1940s–1970s). She was named 2023 Emerging Curator by the Providence Biennial for Contemporary Art for Poiesis, the first exhibition to spotlight Providence street culture, urban design, and experimentalism, and has curated internationally — including in Johannesburg, South Africa — and co-founded The Black Biennial at RISD.

Her writing and criticism appear in Boston Art Review, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, and other publications. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Spelman College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University.