Melanie Rish-Ho '24 was selected to participate in the Black List 2025 Writers Lab. Now in its twelfth year, the Writers Lab hosts a weeklong workshop in Ojai, California for promising feature writers, providing mentorship and support. Rish-Ho’s project, Slab Serif, follows a tidy typeface designer and professor at Cooper Union as his life is thrown into disarray when he is assigned the same classroom as a messy sculpture professor.
“The Black List Writer's Lab in Ojai was an amazing experience,” said Rish-Ho. “Us writers got to spend five days workshopping our screenplays with each other and with industry mentors whose careers we aspire to. I came back with confidence about where my script stands in the industry landscape as well as how to make it stronger.”
She explained that the writers lab was a great experience to connect with other artists working on a variety of projects who welcomed and challenged her as a colleague. She said, “At Columbia, I sometimes felt like a bit of an odd duck for writing primarily romance. So it was heartening to see the affinity and growing hunger for that genre out in the industry. I'm grateful to the Black List for this opportunity and their continued support of us writers.”
Melanie Rish-Ho is a Canadian-born, Hong Kong-raised screenwriter, director, and hopeless romantic represented by Atlas Artists. She writes about the bonds we take most seriously and the funny ways they make us behave. Melanie has taught screenwriting as an adjunct at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. She's also an advisor for Sundance Collab's Core Elements Screenwriting course. Her shorts have won awards like the Red Dot Communication Design Award and Best Live Action Film at the Forbes 30 under 30 Short Film Festival. In 2023, Melanie's feature screenplay Jeremy & The Chans was a finalist for the WGAE x Film Nation Fellowship. In 2025, her feature screenplay The Healing News of June was named Faculty Selects at Columbia University’s Film Festival. BCDF Pictures (To Leslie, The Hating Game) is attached to produce Slab Serif.
