Life & Work with Melina Brown

Hi Melina, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hi! I’m a screenwriter and DJ now living in the Hollywood area!  Should I start from the very beginning? From the time I was a child, my mother knew that I wanted to be a star. The first time I dressed up for Halloween, it was as a “pop star”, complete with a microphone earpiece and glittery pants. I performed any dance move I could remember from the popular Aaliyah and Britney Spears music videos on my television. I never forgot how I felt that day.

I was lucky to have parents who wanted to support my love of the arts, and I ended up going to a performing arts middle school and high school in Florida where I was raised. There, I participated in musical theater education alongside my regular schooling but by the time I graduated, I knew that I wanted to find a chance for my voice to be a part of the material I was performing.

I moved to New York City and attended NYU’s Tisch program, seeking to gain the skills to tell the real-life stories of those around me. As a Jamaican American, telling a Caribbean story was the first task on my list. I was grateful to meet a brilliantly talented director by the name of Maya Cozier, who was developing a film that would eventually be known as She Paradise. She and I wrote a proof-of-concept short film, which we were able to get funding for and shoot. That short went on to be acknowledged by multiple outlets and gave us more recognition and funding to go on and produce a feature version.

Maya shot the feature beautifully in Trinidad and as a result, our first film was accepted into Tribeca Film Festival’s 2020/2021 competition. Going through such a gratifying experience at the height of the pandemic was nerve-wracking, but it was incredible to see the film’s impact at every screening. During this time, I was also working at the amazing Sleep No More production in New York City. I did well managing the performers and I was tapped to help run a new burlesque show they were producing with nightlife producer Susanne Bartsch called Bartschland Follies. It was a wildly wonderful time in my life where I managed drag queens, jugglers, fire performers, and other acts that are better off seen instead of explained.

I loved managing performers, but I started to miss performing myself, so I began acting in small student film projects. I also was recruited into the Legendary House of Labeija, a vogue house in New York City where I walked the category of “face”. You walk up to the judges, you give them your personality, you show them your best look and, of course, you present your face. I ended up winning one trophy for women’s face in my vouge house career and I cherish it still to this day in my apartment. Being a part of the ballroom scene in a vouge house was such an unbelievable experience. It was before the show Pose was released and before the public was really interested in what these black and brown queer people are doing and how they are competing, interacting, and rewarding, one another on stage and in public.

I relocated to Los Angeles and landed a wonderful job as the Showrunner’s Assistant to Robin Thede, an incredible talent and comedian in the industry that I am so lucky to have learned under for two Emmy-nominated seasons of her sketch comedy show, A Black Lady Sketch Show. It was another community that I was yearning to be a part of and that I was so happy to learn from powerful, black women who were lighthearted, funny, professional, supportive, and compassionate in the art that they were making. I had aspirations to join the writer’s room of the show after my tenure as Robin’s assistant, but during the writer’s strike, unfortunately, the show was canceled. I continued freelancing as a screenwriter/script doctor and working with producers on developing their projects for production, but I never lost sight of my own projects, nor did I lose sight of my own desire to perform and create amazing art.

With all the extra time on my hands during the writer strike, I decided to push forward on a hobby that I had taken cultivating: DJing. I landed my first major gig thanks to my dear friend and mentor, Janelle Boumel,who advocated for me to play an opening set for Zedd during a Tech Week event. It was terrifying, to say the least, but I had a magnificent time. I met tons of people and made many connections that helped me launch a DJ career alongside my career as a writer. Since June, I have performed at multiple venues, including Soho House, Oasis in San Francisco for Pride, and more! I am incredibly thankful for every single performer, artist dancer, singer, actress, director, producer, and screenwriter I’ve ever come in contact with with. Each of them has informed my art and my ability to become the nuanced multi-hyphenate that I am today.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Some of my biggest obstacles have all stemmed from being a woman in the theatrical, film, and music industries. Coupling that with being a queer black woman, I have found much more success with performers who have empowered me to share my story. Whether it be my family story as Jamaican-Americans, my personal story as a young woman in a big city, or even the stories of my friends, who come from all sizes, colors, and expressions. Financially, the spaces that cater to minorities have not necessarily been supported by major corporations, and I would often have to fit myself into the appropriate professional sphere to be seen by these corporations. But all the successful and proud black women I work with daily open my eyes to opportunities to create the stories that they strive to tell the world. I carry that lesson with me and everything that I do to the day.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I specialize in screenwriting coming-of-age, horror, and dark comedy stories. All of my writing has also had a through-line of including dancers and performers that I love. I often write for them. As a DJ, my musical selection fuses Afro-Caribbean rhythms with the classic house, disco, and R&B jams.

Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I am a big fan of writers Victor LaValle (The Changeling), Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters), and Haruki Murakami (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World). I love to write poetry when I am stuck on a script and look to Maya Angelou, Alexis De Beaux, and Jericho Brown for inspiration. As a filmmaker, I am a huge fan of Céline Sciamma’s work and she informed a lot of the creative process for our film, She Paradise. Additionally, I love every film done by Spike Lee, Gaspar Noé, Kasi Lemmons, and Darren Aronofsky. My favorite films, however, are more scattered. I equally love 8 1/2 (1963), Airplane (1980), The Jerk (1979), Let The Right One In (2008), Boogie Nights (1997), Moulin Rouge (2001), and the entire Black Mirror series.