Melissa Hacker is an award-winning filmmaker, editor and writer who works with memory, family history, and loss. Melissa made her directing debut with the documentary My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports, which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination, seen in film festivals, museums, universities, on broadcast and streaming television worldwide and had an extended theatrical release in New York City. Melissa’s video Venus was featured in the gallery exhibit “Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art,” and received accolades in The New York Times‘ review. Venus was also screened in Vienna, where it was filmed, at the Josephinium Medical History Museum. Melissa’s three channel video Letters Home screened at Stranger than Fiction at the IFC Theater in New York City, and the New York, Washington, DC, and Toronto Jewish Film Festivals. Melissa is currently directing, producing, and editing the documentary short 256,000 Miles From Home and Ex Libris: A Life in Bookplates, an animated documentary on her Austrian grandfather’s life and bookplate collection.
Working as a freelance editor, Melissa edited the Academy Award nominated documentaries Sister Rose’s Passion and The Collector of Bedford Street, episodes of MTV’s True Life, National Geographic TV, ABC’s Turning Point, and the PBS/BBC American Cinema series. Melissa was an editor on The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition for Britain’s Channel 4 (two BAFTA nominations), and edited Beyond Conviction, a feature documentary on restorative justice that won the Audience Award at the Woodstock Film Festival, aired on MSNBC and was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Melissa is a native New Yorker and a wandering professor, and has taught in New York, New York; Montclair, New Jersey; Havana, Cuba; and Yangon, Myanmar.