Melissa House

Teaching Artist

Mel House, a classically trained award-winning actress, has played roles from Shakespeare to Ibsen, working Off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally, as well as originating roles for the web, film, and TV. In 2019, she played a recurring role in the series Trace Me and toured with The Baby Monitor--a new play about same-sex parenting--at Belgrade’s National Theatre in Serbia and Dublin’s Gay International Theatre Festival. In 2020, she played opposite Chad Coleman in the award-winning film, Broken Bird, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and SXSW.

Mel is a proud member of the Actors Center Company, where she works with Master Teachers including Ron Van Lieu, Becky Guy, Michele Shay, Maria Aitken, Paola Coletta, Dakin Matthews, and Grace Zandarski. In 2019, she studied with Per Brahe doing mask-based work at Balerung Stage, in Bali, Indonesia. She is currently training with Catherine Fitzmaurice to become a certified Fitzmaurice Voice teacher. Mel is a graduate of the William Esper Studio, and holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Exeter’s School of Drama in the UK. She enjoys sharing her experience and passion with young New Yorkers as a teaching artist with Literature to Life, Lincoln Center Theater, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 

Mel is a prolific creator, capable of actualizing elaborate visions. After producing the Off-Broadway production of Meir Ribalow’s Shrunken Heads at Playwrights Horizons, Mel co-founded The Drawing Board--a lab for playwrights, screenwriters and actors. She co-directed and filmed Break Like You, a short documentary about Hip Hop influencer and activist Emile Jansen in Cape Town, South Africa, and was a 2019 finalist for Sundance’s New Voices Lab and the Orchard Project’s Episodic Lab with the digital series Hot Angry Mom, which is currently in post-production.