My first film, Sir: Just a Normal Guy, was made as a DIY labor of love in the earliest days of digital video. When it screened around the world, won national distribution and broadcast, I knew I was going in the right direction.

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A woman with dark brown hair smiling and showing her teeth, wearing a black turtleneck, outdoors with an urban cityscape in the background.

Three feature films, two academic books, and many short films later, I now make films, write, and I lead new generations of filmmakers to learn their craft and find their voices. I’ve traveled the world with my work, been nominated for many awards, and have won quite a few competitive grants and awards. I’m now at work on my first creative non-fiction book.  

 

I am a Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and have written op-eds and articles published in The Progressive, NACLA, and other respected magazines.

My films screen internationally, broadcast on PBS, and are used in classrooms and by community groups to spark discussion and spur local action. My work has won funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Solutions Journalism Network, the Yip Harburg Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund, and Project Pericles faculty grants from the Mellon Foundation. 

I was born and raised in Michigan, have lived in the Bay Area and Philadelphia, and now divide my time between New York City and the Catskill mountains. 

 
 

Melanie's films feel like someone taking your hand and walking you into someone's world. You empathize with the characters through the telling of their story and the backdrop of their environment. There’s a texture to the storytelling that adds depth, and, by the end of the film,
you leave caring for the characters, their world, and their issues.