Melanie La Rosa

I am an award-winning filmmaker and a professor at Pace University. I am also a 2022 Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with the OpEd Project and Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

My documentaries focus on social issue stories and have generated critical acclaim and applause at film festivals. My documentary, How To Power A City (2023) was also released as several short films, one of which — Solar Libre: Family Affair — won The Director’s Award, Best Short Puerto Rico Documentary (2019 Rincón International Film Festival).

As a Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with the OpEd Project and Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, my op-eds have been published in national magazines like World War Zero and The Progressive magazine. My book, "Communities and the Clean Energy Revolution: Public Health, Economics, Design, and Transformation" was published by Lexington Books in 2022, and re-released in paperback in 2023. Additional publications include the NACLA Report on the Americas, EDITMedia, the Journal of Film and Media, and Women’s eNews. I frequently speak at conferences and events; a few recent events include CleanMed2024, APHA2024, and the Virtual Island Summer 2024. In 2025 I will publish "Contemporary Post-Production," a look at editing, editors, and staying sane during post-production.

My other films include The Poetry Deal: a film with Diane di Prima (2011), which di Prima’s family and fans embraced as a rare glimpse into this avant-garde poet’s storied life. It remains the only documentary solely focused on the life and work of this legendary poet, who passed away in October 2020. The Poetry Deal airs on PBS stations across the U.S. from 2022 to 2025. My first film, Sir: Just A Normal Guy (2001), was released to acclaim at LGBTQ festivals and events globally, and received as a sensitive first-person portrait of a widely misunderstood area of human experience. Sir and The Poetry Deal are both used widely in educational settings and are in the permanent collections of the nation’s most prestigious universities.

My career has had an unswerving focus on media for social change and has been recognized with grants from: the New York State Arts Council, the Andrew W. Mellon / Periclean Faculty Leadership Program, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, The Solutions Journalism Network, The Yip Harburg Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, The Eastman Fund, and the IFP Project Involve. My celebratory video about the historical importance of LGBTQ literature, “An LGBTQI Book Saved My Life” (2014), made for the Lambda Literary Awards, was featured to outstanding reviews on www.advocate.com.

As a film professor, I teach experiential, hands-on production courses in writing, directing, editing, field production, and film history/contemporary film, helping new generations of filmmakers learn their craft and find their voices. I also lead student teams in collaborative projects with community organizations to make short videos and multimedia work. These collaborations have included the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the award-winning “Parenting, Prisons, and Pups” program for women in carcerel systems; and Teatown Lake Preserve.

As an academic, my research interests include diversity in media, personal documentary, environmental communications, and teaching methodologies for film and media production.

My producing work prior to entering academia included working with Emmy- and Peabody-award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa at Futuro Media Group, creating multi-platform media events for the NPR show Latino USA and the PBS series America By The Numbers with Maria Hinojosa. I also served as crew on documentaries screening at the New York Film Festival, Full Frame Film Festival, and many other highly respected events.

I earned an MFA in Film and Media from Temple University and a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan. I grew up outside of Lansing, Michigan, now live in New York City, and have lived in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Washington D.C.