Melissa Totten
Melissa Totten is the owner of M+Co, a multidisciplinary company offering premium research, writing, and creative consulting for arts and culture ventures. M+Co operates from Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Boston, and New York.
Totten is a former PBS Los Angeles Emmy award-winning writer-producer of arts and culture documentaries, including "Bakersfield Country", "Take Five" and the series she created for KCET, "The Works".
The past director of the 20th Century Fox Photo Archive, she oversaw a documentary photo collection of more than 10 million items, and developed a preservation program whose end goal was to provide access to the collection for educational and entertainment purposes.
As an arts executive, Totten has also worked at the Autry, at EXTRA, at the Gerald Peters Gallery and at FOLK New England.
As a consulting creative director, she curates and provides content and archival research to television, films, galleries, museums, and book publishers.
She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in American Studies, with a focus on the idea of the frontier in American history. Totten pursued further training at the George Eastman House, and was a fellow at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
