Melissa Spearman is an animation production manager and a graduate of the Academy of Art University in San Francisco California. As one of the school's first full-time remote production students, Melissa worked as a Lead Producer at the school's StudioX program while majoring in Animation & Visual Effects. The first film that she worked on while performing this role, Strawberry Mansion, made it into the first completely remote Sundance Film Festival in 2021. Prior to enrolling at AAU, she was also a completely online student at Jefferson State Community College in Birmingham, Alabama.

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Being a homeschooled and online student her entire academic career has helped Melissa to achieve a well-developed ability to look for solutions to creative challenges while working with large groups of artists from diverse backgrounds and locations. Although she can initially appear to be shy and reserved in person, Melissa loves to connect and work with artists who are passionate about their craft, and she is very rarely intimated when it comes to realizing her own artistic visions on her computer. As a result, Melissa has acquired a thorough working knowledge of remote production environments, creative trends and their evolutions throughout history,  production management techniques, and many of the virtual tools and applications being used by today’s leading digital artists.

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