Melissa Jo Peltier
Wellesley High School Author: Melissa Jo Peltier (1979)
At WHS, Melissa Jo Peltier was clear on her career focus: the daughter of a Wellesley librarian and the creator/curator of the Boston Public Library’s Audio-Visual department (and Harvard lecturer on the cinema), she wanted to succeed in writing and film. At the age of 23, Melissa won the first of her two Emmy Awards and a Humanitas Prize for her writing and directing.
She is also the co-author (with Cesar Milan, the “Dog Whisperer”) of five books which were New York Times bestsellers (including Cesar’s Way and How to Raise the Perfect Dog), along with two other co-authored books, The Mommy Docs, and Don’t Let Your Doc Kill You. (According to her website:) She has accumulated over 50 national and international awards and accolades for her work as a producer, writer and editor of both documentary and dramatic television and film productions. Melissa is best known for her work as director and co-writer of the primetime documentary special, Scared Silent: Exposing and Ending Child Abuse, hosted by Oprah Winfrey. This multi-network simulcast was hailed as television’s most watched documentary ever, and earned Melissa the coveted Humanitas Prize.
Following closely on its heels was the Peabody Award-winning “Break the Silence: Kids Against Child Abuse”, which Melissa wrote and directed. In 1994, she was producer-director-writer of A&E’s four-hour special, Titanic: Death of a Dream and Titanic: The Legend Lives On, then the highest-rated program ever aired on A&E, which won two Emmy Awards, including an award to Melissa for outstanding documentary writing.
Three more Writer’s Guild of America nominations for documentary feature writing followed in subsequent year, as well as three primetime Emmy Nominations for Best Reality Show as an Executive Producer of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan. Dog Whisperer also won the People’s Choice Award in 2010. Melissa is a co-founder, partner and executive producer at the Burbank-based production company MPH Entertainment, which has created over 350 hours of original documentary and reality television programming, dozens of which she produced, wrote or directed.
Melissa’s dramatic TV and feature credits include writing the Lifetime movie Nightwaves starring Sherilyn Fenn, and the story for the hit CBS series, Ghost Whisperer. With her MPH partners, she served as producer of the film Men Seeking Women (starring Will Farrell) and co-executive producer of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, one of the most popular and profitable indie films of all time. Most recently, she produced the multi-festival-winning indie feature, White Irish Drinkers, for Ovington Avenue Productions, of which she is also a principal with her husband, film/TV writer/director John Gray. She is also the author of the novel Reality Boulevard.
Melissa writes of her time at WHS: “Jeannie Goddard was truly as much of an influence on my writing (and reading) as any of my college professors – and I was a double major in English Literature and Creative Writing, so that’s a lot of professors. In fact, Jeannie’s AP course was such a wonderful, in-depth education in American Literature, I never needed to take American lit in college and still nailed all the questions about it on the English comps at the end of my four years there.”