Writer, vocalist, director, and live artist Melissa Birch creates interdisciplinary performance works that transpose social contexts into live installations. Her stage work, dance theater & music collaborations have been presented via numerous commissions, productions & collaborations throughout the Twin Cities, U.S, & abroad since her first professional performance at the Walker Art Center in 1993.

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At 19, she trained in improv comedy & commedia dell'arte with Elaine and Dennis Kern @ the Ark Theatre (Madison), producing her first written works in popular feminist revues. After 2 years in San Francisco, she returned to the midwest to A burgeoning MPLS comedy & cabaret scene. Her immersive training in Margolis Method rooted her performance practice in a lyrical physical vocabulary. melissa's solo characters, singing style, & one-woman shows courted the mainstream while upending conventional rules of spectatorship, in collaboration with jazz wunderkinds Drew Jansen, Eugene Huddleston, Jimmy Kennedy & Dan Chouinard.

In 1997, cabaret bookings brought melissa to New York's don't tell mama. A year later her work found homes @ PS122, Cornelia Street Cafe, Dixon Place, Here & more. As a teaching artist in the NYC boroughs, she taught playwriting & theater skills to elementary & middle schoolers. In late 2001, Melissa returned to MPLS to produce the Tuesday night new performance revue Red Curtain Cabaret. A few months later, she was joined onstage by pianist & twin-flame Stevie Pomije. for two years Together they would re-codify volumes of country, jazz & B-side innovations, producing the sleeper hit The Elton John Show.

In 2007, an embodied physicality infiltrated Melissa's  installations. For the next decade, Melissa wrote, directed & performed in numerous dance-theater collaborations, including the 2 year work-in-process Flying Nuns, War Queer Peace Solo & undying regrets for the future @ open eye figure theatre.

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In 2016, Melissa directed the BareBones Outdoor Puppet Extravaganza, You Were Once Wild Here. Also in 2016, her evening-length work-in-progress, Who Moved My Child, was presented by Right Here Showcase @ the Illusion Theater, co-directed by Sharon Picasso & choreographer Deborah Jinza Thayer. Caroline Palmer of the Star Tribune called it "the fever dream that is female adolescence". Meet the WMMC cast. In October 2018, Melissa wrote & performed the vagina piece in All Hail the Queen at The Cowles Center in downtown Minneapolis.

The Presidensity Project was a 4-year research residency (11.16-1.21) addressing American complicity through performance research & studio practice. The  project  built on Birch’s  reputation  for delivering vanguard performance  products  within    a    flexibility of form ahead  of   mainstream    articulations.

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Most recently, the COLLAB video series, engenders new normals, overlaying dance forms upon the dense theoretical text of theorist Lauren Berlant.