We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Melanie Mendoza a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Melanie, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

Ever since I was a little girl I was very creative! I loved drawing and doing arts and crafts, I’ve always had a wild imagination and I loved making up bedtime stories for my younger cousins. I also grew up with my mom always having a camcorder out so I grew up being very comfortable around the camera. I used to love filming music videos, skits and recreating scenes from TV shows with friends and family and then editing them on iMovie. My first big girl purchase was a Canon G7X when I was 15, I used to do babysitting as my first job and saved all my money from it. It’s funny because now all the influencers are obsessed with that camera and I think it’s gone up in price and for a while it was just collecting dust on my bookshelf but she is making a comeback for sure!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hi everyone! My name is Mel, short for Melanie, I was born in Houston, Texas but was raised in Monterrey, Mexico until I moved on my own to LA for college and have lived here ever since! Originally, I went to college for Animation but halfway through realized it wasn’t really for me and I had dabbled a bit in filmmaking with some of the friends I had made from that major and realized I enjoyed doing it a lot more so I switched to majoring in Filmmaking and kept Animation as a minor.

It’s been a crazy journey ever-since! My first internship was with Salute Your Shorts Film Festival and I got to help out with the programming and the marketing for the festival. On the day of the festival I got to work behind the scenes and was a juror for the Best of Fest category. It was a really great experience and it only furthered my love for the craft. Once I graduated college, I got an internship with the Television Academy Foundation and got placed at Endemol Shine North America as my host company. That summer, I got to work with the development team to work on reality tv shows. After my internship ended, I did some time as a background actor working on tv shows like Sex Lives of College Girls, How I Met Your Mother, Grey’s Anatomy, Bel-air, America’s Got Talent and got to be on a Lyrical Lemonade music video as well. Some of the best experiences I’ve had so far! A few months later, a fellow TV Academy Alum I had met during my internship at Endemol reached back out to me about an opening in the Current Programming department so I applied and got the job and a few months later ended up moving to being part of the development team. Two years later I am still working with the development team and have worked on projects like Deal or No Deal Island and the upcoming Fear Factor reboot. I am learning a lot from being at this company but I am still finding projects on the side to keep furthering my own personal passion projects.

I’m a little of a swiss army knife in the sense that I have a lot of interests, I really enjoy directing, acting, production design, hair & makeup and even some SFX makeup as well but I also really love music and singing and dancing. Whenever I’m networking I tell people I’m happy to help with whatever they need, I just want to help bring the vision to life.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

After my internship with the Television Academy, I wasn’t able to secure a full time position so I had to go back to finding part-time jobs to help pay the bills. At one point, I was juggling three different jobs just to make ends meet. I was working at the mall on the weekends, working at a family owned pizza parlor by my apartment during the week which was very poorly ran and I would often be left alone to do everything (taking orders, working the cash register and making the food and we didn’t only sell pizza!) and doing 10-15 hour shoots for background acting. Back then I also didn’t have a car so the bus rides to some of these places would be two hours there and two hours back.

During this time I joined Group Effort Initiative which is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping diverse people get into the entertainment industry so whenever I wasn’t working I was attending panels and networking events at Netflix, Dreamworks, Paramount and Disney.

After months of trying to keep up with work while trying to still pursue my passions, it became exhuasting and I was reaching burnout. I was too stressed and tired to be creative on my free time and all I wanted to do was rest.

I was getting really discouraged because it felt like I was putting myself in all the right places and yet nothing was coming from it and I didn’t have the energy or money to go full speed ahead with my personal projects but I knew I couldn’t give up and I just had to keep trying and keep persevering.

Right before I got hired at Endemol I used to have really short nails since I worked at the pizza parlor and it sounds silly but there came a day where I had had enough and I told myself that I didn’t know how but I was never going back to the pizza parlor again and so I got my nails done (and I like them long) and a few days after that I was contacted about the position that got me hired. Ever since, I’ve never had short nails again!! In a way, I like to think that small mindset change was enough for me to manifest the opportunity.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

It’s non linear and sometimes that’s a hard pill to swallow for ourselves and those around us. Society was built on a very linear expectation of what someone’s timeline towards “success” should look like and oftentimes if we don’t follow that timeline we are labeled as unstable or crazy or reckless, etc. Creative journeys are all very different and unique from one another, we can’t compare our journey to someone else’s and we have to understand that success looks different for everyone too.

Most creatives are never truly satisfied with their work, there’s always something that can be added or something that can be improved, after all, art is so subjective. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing because it’s good to want to strive to better yourself and improve yourself, that’s how we grow and evolve but we also need to carve in moments where we allow ourselves to pause. A pause doesn’t necessarily mean you’re stuck, it just means you have a moment to breathe and be present and be happy with where you are. There was a past version of ourselves that probably couldn’t wait to get to where we are now, but we get so wrapped up in always wanting to keep going that we don’t give ourselves the recognition of how far we have already come.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @melbelle_m
• Youtube: @melbelle
• Other: tiktok: @matchamelbelle