Melissa Anne Rosenberg (born August 28, 1962)
[According to the State of California. California Birth Index, 1905-1995. Center for Health Statistics, California Department of Health Services, Sacramento, California. Searchable at www.familytreelegends.com/records/39461] is an
American screenwriter. She has worked in both film and television and has been nominated for two
Emmy Awards and two
Writers Guild of America Awards, and won a
Peabody Award. Since joining the
Writers Guild of America, she has been involved in its Board of Directors and was a strike captain during the
2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. She supports female screenwriters through the WGA Diversity Committee and co-founded the League of Hollywood Women Writers.
Raised in
Marin County,
California, she majored in dance and theatre at
Bennington College in
Vermont but decided to pursue filmmaking instead, later graduating from the
University of Southern California with a Master's Degree in film and television producing. She worked on several television series from 1993–2003 before joining
The O.C.'s writing staff, eventually leaving the show to write the
2006 film Step Up. In 2006 she began writing the
Showtime series
Dexter, for which she recently completed the fourth season as head writer and Executive Producer. She wrote her second produced screenplay, a
film adaptation of
Stephenie Meyer's novel
Twilight in 2007, and has since adapted the novel's two sequels,
New Moon and
Eclipse. She is married to
television director Lev L. Spiro, with whom she lives in
Los Angeles.
Early life
Rosenberg was born and raised in
Marin County,
California.
Her father is Jack Lee Rosenberg, a
psychotherapist and the founder of
integrative body psychotherapy, and her mother was Patricia Rosenberg, a lawyer. She was the second of four children by her father's first marriage and another by his second.
Rosenberg's father was
Jewish and her mother was of
Irish Catholic background.
[www.jewishjournal.com/cover_story/article/jewish_screenwriter_newmoon_vampires_twilight_melissa_rosenberg_20091111/] As a child, Rosenberg enjoyed presenting plays and recruiting other neighborhood children to perform in her shows.
[ She attended a "massive public high school with a crowd of people bunched in a classroom and expected to learn" in Southern California, and later moved to New York City to join a small theatre company before moving again to Bennington, Vermont to attend Bennington College.]
