Melody Cooper

Melody is a writer, director and producer across TV, film, fiction, comic books and theater. As a recent fellow in Rideback Rise, she wrote the sci fi feature script NATURAL SELECTION and directed a proof of concept funded by the program (winner at 2026 Austin Micro Shorts Film Festival). She won a 2025 Athena List Award and Disney development grant for her dramatic thriller CYGNUS. Her credits include selling a genre TV project to Netflix, writing a feature adaptation of the novel BEASTS OF PREY for Netflix; Co-Producer on Power Book IV: Force; Story Editor on Law & Order: SVU; staff writer Two Sentence Horror Stories. She received an Adobe Women at Sundance fellowship during the Sundance Episodic Lab;  In 2024, Melody was selected for Ryan Murphy’s Half Initiative Directing Program and was invited to Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency in Italy to develop a sci fi TV project and novel. Other residencies: Yaddo and UCross. Melody is a produced playwright and published author of short stories, including RISE in Best Climate Short Stories from Secant Publishing. She is currently developing the TV adaptation of the popular Emily Windsnap books and is a fellowship winner for the inaugural Pink Amongst Men film lab. 

Melody was a 2017 Stowe Story Labs fellow and is a founder of NYX Horror Collective.