Originally from the island of Antigua in the West Indies, Melissa is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in New York City. Most recently, Melissa has worked with Academy Award nominated directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady at Loki Films where she Co-Produced MAKERS: Women & Comedy, a documentary on trailblazing women in comedy airing on PBS in September 2014. With Loki Films, Melissa also Co-Produced Branded, an episode of ESPN's Sports Emmy-nominated Nine for IX series.

Melissa’s perspective as a filmmaker has been greatly shaped by her experience of being a hearing child of deaf parents. Her parents’ deafness meant that she grew up in world where visuals had much more value than words. It is no surprise then, that Melissa's feature-length documentary directorial debut, Silent Music, is a portrait of her deaf family. Silent Music won Best Documentary awards at both the 2014 Maine Deaf Film Festival and the 2012 CaribbeanTales Film Festival, as well as the Audience Choice Award at the 2013 Toronto Deaf Film & Arts Festival.

Melissa’s documentary short, Share and Share Alike, has been shown in film festivals across North America, the Caribbean and Europe. It won the award for Best Film / Video Documentary Production at the 2010 Berlin International Black Cinema Festival in Germany, and was also nominated for Best Short Documentary at the 2010 Pan African Film Festival in Culver City, California.

Melissa's professional background also includes working with AMC (American Movie Classics) producing and production managing behind-the-scenes content for AMC's Original Series, including Hell on Wheels and Low Winter Sun. She also worked as Senior Researcher with award-winning director Ralf Schmerberg at Radical Media, and as Archival Researcher at Jigsaw Productions. Here, she worked with Academy Award winning director Alex Gibney on his documentary feature, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, which was short listed for an Academy Award in 2010.

Melissa is currently in development on several new projects including an online series of documentary shorts, for which she won the Best Pitch award at the 2014 CaribbeanTales Film Festival during TIFF.