Talent Guide

Melinda Pinecone Tenenzapf

  • Discipline:Director, Producer, Writer
  • Program Year:CNN Docuseries Intensive 2022

Bio

Melinda Pinecone is a producer/editor from Brooklyn, NY, and the creator of Proxy. Melinda’s documentary credits include: additional editor of The Big Payback (Tribeca, 2022), co-producer/editor of Ezinma (Tribeca, 2021), associate producer/editor of Jackson Pollock: Blue Poles (Hamptons, DOC-NYC, 2019), associate editor of Netflix’s Who Killed Malcolm X?, and assistant editor of HBO’s King in the Wilderness (Sundance, 2018). Melinda’s credits as a commercial editor include TV and social spots for Intel, Neutrogena, Kroger, Pure Leaf, and Merck. Melinda was shaped by her unusual childhood. She was born to Jewish American parents; her last name, Tenenzapf, comes from her Czech grandfather and means “pinecone” in German. After Melinda’s mother died when she was a baby, she was raised by her Jamaican nanny, Beverley, who brought her to the Jamaican countryside throughout her childhood. When Melinda was 15, as a student in Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, she directed Jewmaican, a short autobiographical documentary that won the Youth Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival. At Marlboro College, Melinda studied world politics and documentary film. Since her teen years, Melinda has been an anti-war activist, protesting America’s military budget and foreign policy in the Middle East.

Current Project

Proxy: The Cold War We Weren’t Taught in School

Logline

Narrated by world-class writers from around the globe, Proxy is an eight-part docuseries profiling eight of America’s covert regime change operations of the Cold War. Animated recreations, archival footage, and poetic narration bring stories of coup d’états and covert warfare to life, revealing an American foreign policy that ruthlessly enforced Western interests with little concern for the blowback.