About Melanie
Melanie makes plays, podcasts, films and things happen. She's worked with production companies, youth groups, universities, community arts organizations and corporations. Her favorite projects are those that get people moving towards one another.
Her credits include Six Feet: A Play About What’s Between Us (RiverArts), Kindness Committee (RiverArts) Lethal Lit (IHeartRadio, EEP), One Giant Leap: The Apollo Moon Landing 50 Years On (New York Times), Bloodline (Netflix) and the musical Murderbirds! (RivertownsLab) She is the creator and writer of the long-running New York-based episodic stage show, Laurie Stanton’s Sound Diet, a dark, modern twist on Prairie Home Companion. She is a producer and host of Yesteryear: Stories from Home, a podcast about the history of living on the Hudson River, and of Pod-ette, the podcast companion to the literary magazine
-ette. Melanie is a Senior Fellow with Fairfield University's Quick Center of the Arts for 2024. She is working on a play on the epidemic of loneliness. She is the drummer with The Go-Go’s tribute band, Hot Flash.
Melanie's Story (as told to this website)
When people ask me what I do, I usually answer "I write and make things. Sometimes I teach. Often I direct, occasionally I act."
I stayed home with my kids. And when you do that, and you're at all creatively inclined, you end up being pulled into projects when people knock on your door and seemingly don't take no for an answer. You work within all the cracks of time in the day you can find with whomever is close and whatever is at hand. When the kids go out into the world, the cracks push open into a vast expanse of possibility. Aside from the hours spent doing laundry and figuring out how to pay for things, your life is now your own. You choose your projects, your partners, your materials. It's overwhelming at first, but after a while, there's that knock again. Only now, it's a knock from the inside.
There is no greater thrill than making something that didn't exist before with a group of people who are gifted in ways you are not.