Melissa Montero is a 26-year-old aspiring Latina filmmaker living in Queens, New York of Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian heritage.  She has co-produced and directed a non-broadcast ten-minute promotional video/documentary on Casa Atabex Ache, a non-profit organization that does healing and transformation work for women of color. 

Melissa has also taught video production classes at the Grand Street Settlement After school Beacon Program where she produced and directed a short video on the program’s services. She’s worked at NBC news archives, The History Channel, 11 Penn TV, and is now currently at Cablevision’s Lifeskool and Sportskool VOD channels as a programming coordinator.  She is a graduate of the 2004 National Association of Latino Independent Producer (NALIP) NY Documentary Mentoring Program where she began working on her documentary, Our Women, Our Struggle (working-title).

In the fall of 2005, Melissa’s film became a fiscal sponsored project of Women Make Movies. Last year she received from the Center of Puerto Rican Studies the Puerto Rican Diaspora grant. This past August she graduated from NALIP’s Producer’s Academy held in Tucson, Arizona.  She has been producing and directing this documentary for the past three and a half years. Our Women, Our Struggle is currently in production and is estimated to be completed in late 2008.   Melissa has a Bachelor of Arts in TV/Video from the Hofstra University’s School of Communications.

You may contact Melissa through her email:
melissa@ourwomenourstruggle.com