About Melissa

 

Melissa is a multi-award winning writer, comedian, and filmmaker in Melbourne, Australia. Her solo show Mel McGlensey is MOTORBOAT won the overall Best Comedy Award at Adelaide Fringe 2024.

Melissa has studied and performed improv, stand up and sketch comedy all over the world. She is currently a company member of Soothplayers: Completely Improvised Shakespeare, The Big HooHaa and the director of Completely Improvised Potter and the Producer/Director of Completely Improvised Survivor. Her debut solo show, The Briefing, toured to festivals in Adelaide and Edinburgh in 2022-2023. Her new multi-award winning show, Mel McGlensey Is MOTORBOAT, is touring to festivals at home and abroad in 2024/25. It took home both the Best Comedy award at Adelaide Fringe as well as the Hollywood Tour Award and a Golden Gibbo nomination at the 2024 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Melissa has been a contributor to Reductress.com since 2016 and is a Features Contributor at The Onion. Her writing can also be seen in The Hard Times, The Betoota Advocate, The Huffington Post, The Mighty, Today.com and more.

Melissa has a special interest in games, interactive experiences and the overlap between theater and play. She often collaborates with her partner Douglas Wilson, a videogame designer and Senior Lecturer of game design at RMIT University in Melbourne. They were recently commissioned to display their newest collaboration, "Factions: The Podcast" at No Quarter, an NYU Game Center exhibition.

Melissa is a graduate from the Harold Ramis Film School at The Second City in Chicago (now called Second City Film School), as well as the University of Oregon.

Melissa’s multi award-winning debut short film, “Networking Lunch“ which she wrote, directed and produced, stars David Pasquesi of VEEP, TJ & Dave and The Book of Boba Fett. The film has been an official selection at more than a dozen film festivals all over the world and even took home the Best Comedy Award at the Oregon Short Film Festival and the MadCap Comedy Short Film Festival in 2021. You can watch it here: vimeo.com/373719743


 

awards and achievements:

  • 2024 Best Comedy Award winner at Adelaide Fringe for Mel McGlensey is MOTORBOAT

  • 2024 Hollywood Fringe Touring Award recipient

  • 2022 Commissioned alongside Douglas Wilson to display "Factions: The Podcast" at No Quarter, an NYU Game Center exhibition.

  • 2021 University of Oregon's English Department Alumni Commencement Speaker

  • Winner of the Best Comedy Award at the Oregon Short Film Festival 2021

  • Semi-finalist in the 2020 Stage32 Comedy Writing Contest

  • Awarded the Harold Ramis Film School Screenwriting Fellowship 2018

  • Selected participant of Second City Chicago’s Mary Scruggs Works By Women Festival 2017