Melissa is a Brooklyn-based Voice & Speech teacher/coach and is the Artistic Director of Project: Human Better. She holds an MFA in Voice Studies from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and a BA in Theatre Performance from Marymount Manhattan College (MMC). Melissa is currently serving as an Assistant Professor at MMC, where she teaches Voice & Speech for the Actor, Vocal Characterization, American Accent Acquisition Lab, and coaches productions. She serves as Co-Chair of Professional Development and Educational Experiences for the President’s Advisory Committee for Inclusivity, and is a Fellow for MMC's Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence.
She has coached both professionally and privately in London (Off-West End), New York City, and Miami. She is an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework (FV), and won the 2016 Voice & Speech Review (VSR) Graduate Research Award for her article about how FV's Destructuring technique can address performance anxiety in undergraduate actors. Melissa received a Mellon Immersive and Integrative Pedagogies Grant to investigate the history and context of Standard Dialects and in 2018 published an article entitled The Current Use of Standard Dialects in Speech Practice and Pedagogy: A Mixed Method Study Examining the VASTA Community in the United States with co-author Joe Hetterly.
Melissa and Joe have begun the next phase of research where they are collecting data about theatres affiliated with Theatre Communications Group and Shakespeare Theatre Association, as well as Broadway productions to learn how and when Voice, Text, and Accent/Dialect coaches are used and if/when standard dialects are utilized. The goal of this research study is to get an accurate picture of the current industry in order to better analyze what the pedagogical needs are for actor-training programs.