Melanie Feliciano has more than 20 years of experience writing and developing creative multimedia
content, starting in 1999 as a writer/producer at Latino.com in the women’s tech incubator in San
Francisco. Twenty years later, after creating TheFemmebots.com animated series about women working
in tech and pitching it to the Tribeca Film Festival and Adult Swim, Melanie Feliciano moved back to
hometown Orlando to be closer to family and write a new script about her bisabuela Maria La Gata – a
cigar-smoking, a rum-running property owner in 1920s Puerto Rico. The script has turned into a novel and
inspiration for @CareerTias, an initiative she started to mentor her nieces and nephews as
entrepreneurs and multimedia storytellers. Turns out, it's in our blood to write our own scripts! To
support her creative work, Melanie works as a tech/multimedia consultant to the National Academy for
State Health Policy (NASHP.org), where her data visualizations have told the story of the COVID-19
pandemic and other public health initiatives.