Today we’d like to introduce you to Melissa Knight Andee Kinzy.
Melissa Knight, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
HOT: Monthlies grew out of HOT: The Exhibit, a month-long arts and community project we created in 2025 exploring peri/menopause through visual art, performance, workshops, and conversation. HOT: Monthlies is co-hosted by Melissa Knight and Andee Kinzy.
We’re both multidisciplinary artists, and we came to the project from different creative backgrounds. Melissa Knight is a visual and fiber artist whose work often explores connection, process, and community. Andee Kinzy is a theatre, film, and audio artist who creates participatory experiences around stories and subjects that can be difficult to talk about.
We started HOT because we were both going through peri/menopause and were struck by how little we had understood about it before experiencing it ourselves. We also saw how rarely the subject showed up in arts and cultural spaces – even though it affects an enormous number of people.
HOT: The Exhibit brought together artists, healthcare professionals, educators, and community members to explore peri/menopause from many different perspectives, and to discover that we are not alone.
We didn’t want those conversations to end when the exhibition closed. HOT: Monthlies grew out of that experience: a series of gatherings throughout the year using art, humor, performance, creativity, and conversation to make more room for the messy, funny, frustrating, surprising reality of peri/menopause.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road, and in some ways, that’s exactly why HOT exists.
One of the biggest challenges is that peri/menopause is both incredibly common and still strangely invisible. Many people reach this stage of life without knowing what to expect, and experiences can vary enormously from person to person. At the same time, menopause is wrapped up in larger cultural discomfort around aging, changing bodies, gender, sexuality, and the tendency for people, particularly women, to become less visible as they get older.
There’s also a challenge in simply getting people to show up for something they may not immediately think is “for them.” We’re competing with busy lives, caregiving, work, families, and the discomfort many people still have talking publicly about these subjects.
That has pushed us to think differently about what a peri/menopause event can be. Instead of asking people to come to a lecture or a traditional health program, we invite them to weave a basket, improvise, watch a performance, laugh, make something, or simply sit with other people and talk.
We’re learning as we go, too. HOT isn’t about presenting ourselves as people who have menopause figured out. It’s about creating spaces where we can be curious about it together.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Melissa Knight is a visual and fiber artist whose practice includes basketry, textiles, installation, and community-based art. Her work often brings people together through the act of making, using traditional handcrafts as a way to create connection and conversation.
Andee Kinzy is a theatre, film, and audio artist, writer, director, producer, and teaching artist. Her work ranges from Shakespeare and youth theatre to film, audio drama, immersive experiences, and community-based projects. She is particularly interested in using story, humor, and participation to explore overlooked and deeply human subjects.
Together, we created HOT: The Exhibit and now HOT: Monthlies, an arts-based community series exploring peri/menopause through creativity, information, humor, and conversation. The series brings together artists, performers, educators, healthcare professionals, and community members, with gatherings ranging from basket weaving and improv to health conversations and live performance.
What connects our individual practices, and what sets HOT apart, is our belief that art can open doors to conversations that a pamphlet can’t. We’re interested in the whole human experience surrounding peri/menopause: bodies, relationships, identity, aging, creativity, work, culture, and the stories we tell, or don’t tell, about this stage of life.
We’re most proud of creating spaces where there is no one “right” way to experience it. Peri/menopause can be liberating, miserable, funny, bewildering, empowering, or several of those things in the same afternoon.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
We’re always consuming stories in one form or another.
Andee is currently listening to Real Survival Stories and Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding?, reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai and watching Ride or Die.
Melissa is listening to her good friend Andee’s Kicking the Bucket audio drama podcast, along with If Books Could Kill, All There Is with Anderson Cooper, and Playing Along with Norah Jones, and reading Gravity Let Me Go. She’s currently watching Dark Winds.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://improvedarts.org/hotmonthlies
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hotmonthlies/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hotmonthlies/
