Melody Weinstein- Video Documentary Instructor

Melody Weinstein is the video-documentarian who spearheaded the first UHipHop multi-media program at Paul Revere grammar school from 2001-2003. Through dialogue and experiential training Melody has helped youth create video projects reflecting their family’s lives, their school communities, and their ideas about hip-hop education. She began her video work when she created a documentary about Chicago graffiti community in the year 2000, entitled The Writing on The Wall. She then went on to create the University of Hip-Hop’s first introductory video, which has been used over the last five years to demonstrate the importance of hip-hop education. During the summer of 2005, she received a grant from the Emmy chapter of New York to create a documentary film about Hip Hop in Japan. She spent two months in Tokyo, Japan, and has a produced a documentary film that addresses the historical development and present practices of Tokyo’s hip-hop community. This film will serve as a template for UHipHop youth to learn how to do global hip-hop research through interviews, collaborative public arts projects, and the intricate processes of documentary filmmaking. Melody is a graduate of the University of Chicago, and she recently received her Masters at NYU, where she studied broadcast journalism. While at NYU, she worked as a graduate assistant and taught workshops on video production and digital editing, with a focus on documentary development. In September of 2005, she accompanied a group of NYU journalism students to Houston Texas, where they reported on the victims of Hurricane Katrina. That trip resulted in a half-hour television special on NYU TV about the importance of visual documentation as a tool for education. Melody is dedicated to documentary filmmaking and inspired by the strength and imagination of the youth she has worked with. Drawing on her experience, she will help the students produce film-based UHip-Hop apprentice manuals that document diverse hip-hop education practices.