Melissa Silverstein
Melissa Silverstein is a writer, blogger and marketing consultant. She is an expert in the area of social media regarding women and Hollywood.
She is the founder and editor of Women and Hollywood, one of the most respected sites for issues related to women and film as well as other areas of pop culture.
She has been featured on CNN, the BBC as well as in Newsweek, Salon, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, NY Times, and many other publications. In 2011, Melissa was named one of the Top 100 Arts tweeters by the Times of London and Women and Hollywood was named one of the top 100 websites for women by ForbesWoman.
Recently, her writing was included in The Tattooed Girl: The Enigma of Stieg Larsson and the Secrets Behind the Most Compelling Thriller of Our Time.
Melissa Silverstein is a WMC SheSource expert on Media and Entertainment.
Articles
Featured Columns
A Feminist Film Festival With a Different Take
The Athena Film Festival, opening in its second year this week at Barnard College, is designed to advance a national conversation on women and leadership, as its cofounder Melissa Silverstein explains. More »
The Lilly Awards Honor Women in Theatre
Preempting the male bastion that dominates the Tony Awards, supporters of women playwrights took matters into their own hands, as Women and Hollywood blogger Melissa Silverstein explains. More »
A Transformative Oscar Moment?
Women & Hollywood’s blogger here assesses the implications of a historic win for Kathryn Bigelow. More »
Blog
Celebrating Women’s Media Successes
WMC’s first awards event honored the best work by women in news and entertainment. The recipients, however, cautioned those assembled to pay tribute: many barriers remain. More »
A Theatre Season To Savor
As Broadway celebrates with the Tony Awards Sunday night, the nominations recognize some, but hardly all, of women’s great successes in theatre during the last year. The author analyses why an industry that is bucking the economic downturn continues to shortchange productions by and about women. More »
Pondering the Chick Flick
Call it what you like, the genre comes with both good and bad traits. The author suggests that we reward Hollywood at the box office only when it resists its misogynistic tendencies. More »
Frozen River: Oscar’s 2009 Cinderella Story
A small budget movie breaks every conventional rule for success, and its writer and director, Courtney Hunt, is riding high—whether or not her film wins awards next week. More »
Keeping Hold of Your Vision—the Making of Hounddog
One of the dirty secrets of the film business is that it takes women directors a long time to get their films made. The Women, which opened recently, took Diane English 14 years to bring to the screen; other examples include Tamara Jenkins award-winning The Savagesand Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, which took 10 years each. Writer/director Deborah Kampmeier joins this illustrious club with her own decade long trek to see her filmHounddog starring Dakota Fanning finally released in theatres. More »
Women Ahead of the (Blog) Curve
Four years ago Lisa Stone, Jory des Jardins and Elisa Camahort Page wanted to settle the annoying question they were constantly hearing: where are the women bloggers? So they put out a call, on their blogs of course, asking women if they would come to a conference, and, as Elisa says, the "response was immediate, passionate and positive.” Today Blogher has exploded from the 300 early attendees to 1,000 women (and a couple of guys) who just spent two days in San Francisco networking, learning and creating community around the act of blogging. More »
