Melissa Beatriz is a Uruguayan American documentary filmmaker, cultural producer, and researcher whose work focuses on the intersection of social justice, media arts/culture, and policy. Since 2010, Melissa has collaborated with artists and arts organizations throughout the Greater Philadelphia region as a producer, resource mobilizer, and communications strategist. She has worked closely with grassroots organizations that center diverse communities and focus on immigrant justice, racial justice, and cultural justice.

 Through her research, she investigates the cultural organizing networks in Philadelphia, and how diverse artists engage in praxis and discourse practices which impact politics and policy. Using an overarching multimodal approach through bridging the interdisciplinary fields of Communication and Social Welfare, her dissertation study triangulates video and digital ethnography, critical discourse and framing analysis, and ethnographic survey methods. She advocates for the use of multimodality as a tool, in order to ensure that research is accessible beyond the academy.

As an arts administrator and advocate with expertise in development, she has mobilized resources to collaboratively develop projects, programs, and small organizations. For example, more recently she served as a co-founder and development lead of ¡Presente! Media, a Philadelphia-based collective that produces bilingual journalistic articles and documentaries. Through advocacy, she has played a role in shifting local conversations about cultural equity, by participating in groups such as the Arts Funding Coalition, Securing the Roots, the Lenfest Visioning Table, and the Arts & Culture Taskforce Permanence subcommittee.

Melissa is the Founder/Director of Actívate Stories, a media arts entity that produces collaborative documentaries, engages in cultural preservation, and develops creative strategies focused on art and social change. She is a 2022 Al Día 40 Under 40 honoree, 2019 Leeway Transformation Awardee, and 2020 Fellow of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) Leadership Institute. Her media work has been supported by Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures, ARTisPHL, Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Scribe Video Center, Independence Public Media Foundation, Velocity Fund, Doc Society: Good Pitch Local Philadelphia, Leeway Foundation, Double Exposure Scholars program, and Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Philadelphia Day Lab.

She has a Joint PhD in Communication and Social Welfare, as well as an MSW from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of Rising Wing, SIFT Media 215, and Brown Girls Doc Mafia.