About Host & Producer Leigh Melander, Ph.D.

Leigh Melander has a doctorate in Cultural Mythology and Psychology, with an emphasis in Imaginal Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute; and an undergraduate degree in performance, history and literature from Penn State. She studied writing by invitation with Nobel Poet Laureate, Derek Walcott, at Boston University.

She has an eclectic background in the arts, nonprofit management, and marketing, branding, and strategic planning consulting in the nonprofits and for-profit worlds. She works today as a cultural mythologist and organizational/individual coach, helping people to imagine past what they think is possible.

Leigh is also a singer/songwriter, whose first album of harp and vocal music hit the Top Forty Folk Charts; she has performed internationally as an actor; she has served as a teaching artist in schools and universities around the country; led an innovative community-government-nonprofit coalition to create a multi-tenant family resource center; and has generally romped through her life deciding that the next cool shiny thing was a great thing to reach for, and stretching out her hand.

She has served as a board member for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and on the academic advisory board for  Spring Journal for several years, was featured on the on the History Channel as an expert on myth and story, and hosted Myth America, a weekly radio program on myth and imagination on an NPR affiliate in New York for four years. She was the founding editor of the Joseph Campbell Foundation MythBlast essay series, and has been published in Spring Journal, the award-winning Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies,and released her first book, Psyche’s Choice in 2020. Leigh works with individuals, communities, and organizations to imagine past what they think as possible, and she and her husband own Spillian: A Place to Revel, a regenerative center for imagination and creativity on the historic Fleischmanns Yeast family estate in the Catskills.

You can learn more about her writing and coaching work at leighmelander.com.