Melissa Haizlip

Melissa Haizlip is a Peabody Award-winning, Emmy-nominated filmmaker born in Boston, MA and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands, New York and Connecticut, where she went to Yale University. Her work responds to pressing social issues at the intersection of racial justice, social justice, activism, and representation. Female transformation and empowerment are at the core of all of her ideas, to advocate and amplify the voices of women and people of color. Melissa's feature documentary, Mr. Soul! (Max) won the 2022 Peabody Award for Best Documentary. In 2022, Mr. Soul! was nominated for the 43rd News & Documentary Emmy Awards for Best Sound. Mr. Soul! was shortlisted for the 93rd Academy Awards for Best Original Song. The film won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Writing in a Documentary (Television or Motion Picture), the 2020 Critics Choice Award for Best First Documentary Feature, and received total of three NAACP Image Awards nominations and five Critics Choice nominations, including Best Feature Documentary for each. The film was nominated for the 2021 Cinema Eye Honors for Outstanding Debut Feature. In 2019 Mr. Soul! was a finalist and won a prize for the inaugural Library of Congress Lavine / Ken Burns Prize for Film, a new, annual prize that recognizes a filmmaker whose documentary uses original research and compelling narrative to tell stories that touch on some aspect of American history. The film won Best Music Documentary at the 2018 International Documentary Association Awards. Mr. Soul! premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and screened at 50 festivals, receiving 16 Jury and Audience Awards for Best Documentary, including the AFI DOCS 2018 Audience Award for Best Documentary, and the 2019 FOCAL Award for Best Use of Archival Footage in an Entertainment Production in London.

Melissa directed and produced Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop and produced You're Dead To Me (2013) directed by Wu Tsang, about a grieving Chicana mother coming to terms with the loss of her transgender child on Día de los Muertos. The film won Best Short at the 2014 Imagen Awards, and screened at over 50 festivals and museums worldwide. Melissa's two-channel art films have been exhibited by the Hammer Museum Los Angeles Biennial, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Melissa has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation JustFilms, National Endowment for the Humanities, International Documentary Association, National Endowment for the Arts, Black Public Media, Firelight Media, ITVS, Awesome Without Borders, and Puffin Foundation. She is the 2021 GreenLight Women Filmmaker Grant Award grantee, a Flaherty Fellow, Black Public Media Artist in Residence, and an alumnus of Film Independent's Project Involve, Chaz and Roger Ebert Fellowship, Firelight Media Doc Lab, and PGA Diversity Workshop. Melissa has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Jacob Burns Film Center. She has been a key-note speaker at the Black Star Film Festival, and sat on review panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is on the nominating committee for the NAACP Image Awards and Black Reel Awards, and serves on juries for the News & Doc Emmy's, PGA Awards, IDA Documentary Awards, Cinema Eye Honors, Denver Film Festival, and SCAD Savannah Film Festival. She has lectured on film at the Academy Museum, Yale, USC School of Cinematic Arts, and several other universities, and has presented for organizations and foundations focused on ethics, legacy, African American art, culture and history. She is co-executive producer of the behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Emancipation (2022) starring Will Smith for Westbrook Media and Apple TV+, and the limited series Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop (2023) for Netflix.

Melissa is Executive Producer with Stephen Curry on his limited series Black Pop: Celebrating the Power of Black Culture (2023) on Peacock. Her film Satisfied, which she directed and produced for Amblin Entertainment, premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival.

Melissa is a member of the Directors Guild of America, Producers Guild of America, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and a Fellow Member of The Broadway League. Melissa lives and works in New York.