Melody Cooper
A 2021 Sundance Episodic Lab Fellow and winner of an Adobe Women at Sundance fellowship, Melody is a genre writer who sold an untitled 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 an Official Selection at several Oscar-qualifying festivals this year. She has recently been on the jury for Slamdance, Wench Film Festival and this year's Casa Cine in France.
She is a Stowe Story Labs board member and co-founder of NYX Horror Collective, which has had two women-directed micro short film programs on Shudder called “13 Minutes of Horror,” (winner, Rondo Hatton Horror Award). For three years, Nyx has partnered with Stowe to offer a writing fellowship to a woman-identifying horror writer.
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.
Melody just returned from the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center at Lake Como, Italy where she was invited for a month-long residency to develop her TV project and novel about climate change. Her short story "RISE" will appear in the 2024 edition of Best Climate Change Stories from Secant Publishing and her short story "Sundown" is now available in African Ghost Short Stories from Flame Tree Publishing.
