Artist Bio

(Bio as of March 2023)

Melisha Mitchell is a writer, storyteller and performer who participated in the Goodman’s GeNarrations program for more than a decade before joining the ranks of their teaching artists. Melisha’s forty-year career as a writer includes stints as a copywriter, trade magazine editor, promotional writer, book translator and technical writer. Over the years, she has penned jewelry, cosmetics and furniture ads, airplane flight manuals, microwave oven instructions, travel brochures, restaurant guides and, as the primary architect of Illinois’ 2010 Open Records Law, hundreds of pages of state statute.

As a performer, Melisha was a founding member of a small Chicago repertory theatre group in her early 20s, appeared on stages in Dakar, Senegal, and Paris, France, with various English-speaking community theater groups in her mid-20s and 30s, and worked with the Theatre for the New City in New York for three years in her 40s, as both a writer and actor, and, from 1992 to 1994, as a member of their award-winning Summer Street Theatre Tour. Since joining GeNarrations in 2012, she has shared stories inspired by her uniquely peripatetic life at the Goodman and, in 2020 and 2023, at the Annual Fillet of Solo Festival.

Melisha is currently working on an autobiographical three-act play tentatively titled, “Like the Army But Spelled Differently.”