Melissa Hacker 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, television, and universities worldwide. Melissa’s video Venus was featured in the group exhibit "Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art," and received accolades in the New York Times review of the show. Her three channel video Letters Home, screened at the New York, Washington DC, and Toronto Jewish Film Festivals. Melissa is directing Ex Libris, an animated documentary on her Austrian grandfather’s life and bookplate collection. Honors received include a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence award in Vienna, and residencies at Yaddo, VCCA, Playa, Willapa Bay AIR, Escape to Create, Saltonstall, and Digital Arts Studios, Belfast NI.

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 (2 BAFTA noms), and edited Beyond Conviction, a feature doc 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 also a wandering professor, most recently at Yangon Film School in Myanmar.