Melissa Hazlip is an award-winning filmmaker born in Boston and raised in the US Virgin Islands, Connecticut and New York. Melissa is the 2016 Artist in Residence at the National Black Programming Consortium, and participated in the 2015 NALIP ARC Diverse Women In Media Residency. She is a Chaz and Roger Ebert Producing Fellow, and an alumnus of Film Independent’s Project: Involve, Firelight Media Documentary Lab, and the PGA Diversity Workshop. Melissa attended Yale University.

In April 2019, she directed and produced the acclaimed new documentary Contact High: A Visual History of Hip Hop with Radical Media for the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. Melissa also 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.  It has screened at over 50 festivals and museums, including the PBS Online Film Festival, the British Museum, Outfest, Frameline38, Palm Springs International ShortFest, and the NYWIFT Women Calling the Shots program at Hamptons International Film Festival. In 2009,

Melissa has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Black Public Media, Firelight Media, ITVS, Awesome Without Borders, and support from ARC NALIP Diverse Women in Media Fellowship. She is currently in production on the sci-fi feature A Day in the Life of Bliss directed by Wu Tsang. She also received the Audience Award for Best Documentary at aGLIFF, the HBO Jury Award for Best Documentary at Urbanworld Film Festival and the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, and the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Woodstock Film Festival.