Melissa Geraci

I am a former film editor who worked in Hollywood with the late Hal Ashby and Dennis Hopper and on the television shows, St. Elsewhere, Bay City Blues, and Mork and Mindy. I used my editing rooms as exhibition spaces during the final phases of my work in Hollywood. As a painter, I was trained and influenced by three people in my life: my late grandmother, Jeannette Demarest Caldwell, who studied at the Art Students league in NYC and the Art Center College in Pasadena, the Studio of Tina LeMarque Denison and with Franklin Liegel in the Advanced Painting Workshops at Otis Art Institute. I began drawing and painting at 3 and participating in community art exhibits at 10 in Manhattan Beach, California. My last exhibit was in NYC about 10 years ago.

I have always had my studio within my home, as my grandparents did in their home in Downtown Los Angeles. My grandfather, John C. Caldwell, was a special effects cinematographer in Hollywood motion pictures, and won an Emmy for Special Effects for City Beneath the Sea. He was influenced by Frank Capra, who he worked with on the Why We Fight series during World War II in the Army Signal Corps. My grandfather made and distributed documentaries from his home film studio.

My grandmother ...

Otis Art Institute (I studied with painter Franklin Liegel in the Advanced Painting workshops)
USC Ph.D. in Political Science and outside area in Cinema TV Critical Studies. I recently completed a MSW at Western New Mexico University and have a M.S. in Special Education from Johns Hopkins.

Manhattan Beach, CA community art fairs circa 1960s and 1980's. NYC circa 2010, Agora Gallery-Group Exhibition.

In addition to exhibitions, I published one book in 2003, John F. Kennedy and the Artful Collaboration of Film and Politics. In 2002, I contributed a chapter on film editing to the book, TRANSITIONS, Voices on the Craft of Digital Editing.