Melody Cooper

Originally a NY actor and playwright, Melody now works in LA. She most recently completed writing a feature adaptation of the African fantasy novel “Beasts of Prey” for Netflix and sold a genre show to Netflix with Will Packer.

After winning the Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at Urbanworld Film Festival, Melody started out as a staff writer on CW's Two Sentence Horror Stories while still in the 2019 HBO Access Writing Program. Other credits: Law & Order: SVU, co-producer on Power Book IV: Force. She did the Sundance Episodic Lab and won an Adobe Women at Sundance fellowship in 2021. She also writes comic books (OMNI) and has directed short films.

She’s co-founder of Nyx Horror Collective which produced two short film programs of women-directed films, “13 Minutes of Horror” that ran on Shudder. She executive produced the short “Hide Your Crazy” that's now playing the festival circuit. Melody is a past fellowship recipient and now a board member of Stowe Story Labs.

Melody has attended several residencies including UCross, Yaddo, NY Stage & Film, Chateau de la Napoule, Banff and has been invited to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency in April 2024 to focus on projects about climate change. She recently traveled to Antarctica to do some research on those projects.