The National Bitter Melon Council uses the form of a vegetable promotion board to create public projects that use the flavor and emotion of bitterness – and Bitter Melon – to spark dialogue about difference, foreignness, and community, and to explore the boundaries between art and life.  Combining performance art and community development practice, the Bitter Melon focused events of the NBMC create projects that propose alternative models for community and coming together and spark dialogue about bitterness, foreignness, and flavor.

The NBMC Executive Committee make up the core leadership of the Council. While all of our projects are collaborative, Jeremy and Hiroko (the Co-Founders), Andi (the Director of Public Relations), and Misa (Volunteer-At-Large) provide primary leadership and direction for the current initiatives of the council.

Andi Sutton explores the ways performance art methodology can create new models for civic engagement with projects that incorporate food, agriculture, climate science, television and street intervention, participatory sculpture, and public art.  An avid collaborator, she has worked with journalists, activists, farmers, librarians, poets, amusement park rides, artists, and plants. Recent exhibitions include: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; the SMART Museum, Chicago, IL; Universidad Nacional (Colombia), Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; among others. Sutton is a member of Plotform (Jane D. Marsching + Andi Sutton) an artist duo that creates projects activating engagement with local ecologies and activates the interconnectedness of riparian species. She was also a member of Platform2: Art and Activism, a performance happening and discussion series about art and social engagement (2007-2012). Her grants and awards include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Council for the Arts, the LEF Foundation, and MFA Boston Traveling Scholars Award. She is also Program Manager for the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies at MIT. Learn more about Sutton on her website www.andisutton.net.