Melanie Coombs is an award-winning producer of animation, documentary and dramatic film and television. Early in her producing career, she won an Australian Film Institute Award for producing Break & Enter (1999) and later produced the Australian clay-animation short film Harvie Krumpet (2003). That film featured voice-work by Geoffrey Rush and won 20 international awards including the Academy Award® for Best Short Film, Animated. Coombs also produced the animated feature film Mary and Max (2009), which involved the voice talents of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette. It won the APSA for Best Animated Feature Film as well as prizes from the Berlin International Film Festival and the Australian Directors Guild.
In 2015, Coombs produced Graceful Girls about competitive calisthenics, which won the documentary audience prize at the Melbourne International Film Festival where it also received its World Premiere. Recently, she produced The Death and Life of Otto Bloom, which was the Opening Night selection of the 2016 Melbourne International Film Festival and was released theatrically in 2017. Melanie is an Ambassador for Screenrights, a member of the Screen Producers Association of Australia, the Australian Academy Cinema and Television Arts and the Asia Pacific Screen Academy.
The Asia Pacific Screen Academy expresses its respect for and acknowledgement of the South East Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of country, including the custodial communities on whose land works are created and celebrated by the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. We acknowledge the continuing connection to land, waters and communities. We also pay our respects to Elders, past and emerging. We recognise the integral role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples continue to play in storytelling and celebration spaces.
