Melody is a genre writer, producer and director whose career spans theater, TV, film, short story and comic books. She is currently a fellow in the 2025 Rideback Rise Accelerator program created by Dan Lin and is developing a sci-fi horror feature film. Melody won an Athena List Award and a Disney Development Grant in 2025 for her dramatic thriller CYGNUS. She is also a fellow in the Ryan Murphy Half Initiative TV directing program. She wrote a feature adaptation of the fantasy novel Beasts of Prey for Netflix and also sold an untitled genre show to Netflix. Melody started out as a playwright in NY and was staff writer on CW's Two Sentence Horror Stories while still in the 2019 HBO Writing Program. She was then story editor on Law & Order: SVU and co-producer on Power Book IV: Force. After winning the Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at Urbanworld Film Festival, Melody won a Women at Sundance Fellowship in 2021 while in the Sundance Episodic Lab. She’s co-founder of Nyx Horror Collective, which produced a program of women-directed short films that ran on Shudder. Melody has directed two short films, including a documentary, DETAINED, that received a 2018 IndieFest Award of Recognition. She executive produced the award-winning short HIDE YOUR CRAZY, which has won 6 awards internationally and has been picked up by ALTER.  Melody’s comic books include OMNI, published by Mark Waid at Humanoids,  the story "Igbo Landing" in Noir is the New Black and "Sky's the Limit" in DC's Milestones in History. As a playwright, Melody received a Ford Foundation grant to travel to Rwanda to develop her play SWEET MERCY, which was later developed by NY Stage and Film, starring Danai Gurira. DAY OF RECKONING about the early Labor Movement in the U.S., was produced in NY and won the Jane Chambers Award. She was invited to Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency in Italy in 2024 to write her speculative climate novel-in-progress The Tree Remembers. Other residencies include Yaddo, UCross and La Napoule Art Foundation in France. Her short stories were published in 2024: "Sundown" in African Ghost Short Stories and "RISE" in Best Climate Change Stories from Secant Publishing.  She's currently developing a supernatural project with Reginald Hudlin, as well as a TV thriller set in London with Unapologetic Projects and a TV adaptation of Liz Kessler's popular Emily Windsnap YA books. Website: www.melodyMcooper.com