Melody Cooper

A 2021 Sundance Episodic Lab Fellow and winner of an Adobe Women at Sundance fellowship, Melody most recently sold a TV show to Netflix and wrote a feature for them. A co-producer on the second season of the Starz show Power Book IV: Force, Melody started out as a staff writer on CW's Two Sentence Horror Stories while still in the 2019 HBO Access Writing Program (one of her two episodes, “Ibeji,” won a Silver Telly). She then joined the 22nd season of Law & Order: SVU. Winner of the 2018 Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at the Urbanworld Film Festival, Melody has developed her work in several labs, including Shudder Labs, NY Stage and Film, The Writers Lab, and Stowe Story Labs (as a Tangerine Entertainment Fellow). Melody executive produced the short, horror-comedy film Hide Your Crazy that was directed by Stowe Alumni Austin Kase and has been selected by several Oscar-qualifying festivals this year.

An award-winning playwright, her plays have been produced in NYC. Melody also writes comic books, including Omni (Vol. 2), the sci-fi story "Igbo Landing" in the anthology Noir Is The New Black, and a story in DC’s Milestones of History about Bessie Coleman and Mae Jemison. She recently joined Stowe Story Labs as a board member and is co-founder of NYX Horror Collective (which has a short film program, “13 Minutes of Horror,” on Shudder) and is partnering with Stowe to offer a writing fellowship to a woman horror writer.