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The Best Bees in the Biz

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The Queen Bee - Melissa Banigan​

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Melissa is a senior communications and creative services wizard with nearly 20 years of experience working with global household brands across the U.S. and the U.K. She's also worked with a bevy of startups across North and South America to develop their brand voice and visual storytelling.

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Also a multi-media journalist, Melissa's work under her own name appears in The Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, NPR, The Independent, among many others. An expert in building thought leaders, she collaborates with executives on articles that place in highly visible publications such as Scientific American, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and Information Week. She also helps companies engage in policy conversations on Capitol Hill by crafting narratives for speeches and placing work in publications like The Hill. An expert interviewer (on camera and off), Melissa has interviewed hundreds of people with a story, including kings and musicians, soldiers and peace-makers, leaders of indigenous congresses and celebrity chefs. 

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Melissa is also the founder and CEO of Advice Project Media, a nonprofit organization that offers multi-media journalism programs for youth and women around the world. Her nonprofit work focuses on gender equality, environmental justice, and climate change and she has collaborated with foundations, including the Ford Foundation (Natural Resources and Climate Change team), as well as nonprofits and indigenous peoples congresses across four continents to lead the charge in planning international events, political actions, and marketing campaigns with real social impact. She has been a keynote speaker at global leadership conferences, enrapturing audiences of thousands and securing dozens of radio interviews.

 

Melissa is committed to freedom of the press, youth rights, and bodily autonomy. She has authored three books for youth: Developing a Strategy for a Political Campaign; Working with the Community in a Political Campaign; and Coping with Teen Pregnancy, all published by Rosen Publishing. And she's developed or written curriculum for many nonprofits and large companies, including Scholastic, Project Explorer, International Center for Leadership in Education, and Successful Practices Network.

 

A committed francophile, Melissa has partnered with over a dozen French Tourism boards and collaborated with Atout France's USA office and the Guadeloupean tourism board to report multimedia stories on Franco-American and Caribbean cultures and history. Also a trained art historian (Columbia University), she curates exhibitions and auctions for select clients. Her last exhibition was with the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) at the Polish Consulate in NYC (in the Joseph Raphael De Lamar House).

 

Before founding HiveMind, Melissa worked in client services and marketing at a fund of hedge fund and a fintech. She helped drive storytelling at Nanobiotix, a late-stage clinical biotechnology company that is pioneering nanotherapeutics with the aim of transforming outcomes for millions of people fighting cancer worldwide. Currently, Melissa directs content strategy at Ethic, a tech-enabled platform that empowers wealth advisors and investors to create portfolios that align personal values with financial goals.
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Brands working with Melissa benefit from her sweet concepts, which makes sense, as the name, "Melissa," is derived from the Latin term “Apis mellifera,” which means "honey-bearing bee."

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Principal & Senior Producer - Mark degli Antoni

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Mark degli Antoni is a senior producer, composer, and sound artist leading many of creative technical components of HiveMind's storytelling projects, including moving imagery, design, audio, and the development of rich, sonic-led narratives. He is also a co-founder of the band, Soul Coughing (Warner Bros.).

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Mark's commercial video work includes developing the sonic narrative for "From One Second to the Next," a long-form PSA about the dangers of texting and driving by director Werner Herzog. The video was part of the multi-award-winning "It Can Wait" campaign from AT&T and agency BBDO. He also partnered with creative technology studio, Superbright, on a VR experience that helped the United Nations bring to life its 2020 Peace Report. Additionally, he's worked with Save the Children, Johnson & Johnson, Target, and Gap Kids, among others, on impactful commercial projects. 

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Award-winning documentary work includes Warner Herzog's "Into the Abyss," Shiori Ito's "Black Box Diaries," Fiona Dawson's "Transgender, at War and at Love" for NYT Op-Docs (and the following feature-length documentary, "TransMilitary"), and a few of AJ Schnack's political documentaries, "Majority Rules," "Caucus," and "Midterms," a TV mini-series broadcast by Al Jazeera America. He has worked on many other films for Werner Herzog, Maya Daisy Hawke, William Wegman, Jed Rothstein, Tania Raymonde, Roger Ross Williams, Wallace Shawn, Sarah Adina Smith, and Joe Bini, among others, and he has collaborated with many creatives on sound design, VR, and installation work (Annie B. Parson, Julia Scher, Christian Marclay, Richard Prince, Sarah Meyohas, to name just a few).

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In addition to Soul Coughing, Mark has performed or recorded with David Byrne, Low, John Scofield, Laurie Anderson, Angelique Kidjo, Redman, John Zorn, and Anthony Coleman. ​​He is a Fellow of the Sundance Film Institute, a Cinema Eye Honors Nominee for Best Score, a Sundance Audience Award Winner, and a judge for the Emmy's selected by International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. 

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