Meleesha Bardolia is a screenwriter and director based in Naarm.

Since 2015, Meleesha has worked as an EPK director for Matchbox Pictures/ABC on BARRACUDA (2016) and SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY (2017) and has completed two director’s attachments with Michael Rymer on Foxtel’s PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (2018) and with Robert Connolly on Made Up Stories/Arena Media’s feature film THE DRY (2020).

Meleesha’s graduate short film MATCH was selected for Melbourne International Film Festival’s Accelerator Program in 2015. Her second short film ARRIVALS won Best Director and Best Actor at the NYC Picturestart Film Festival in 2015. In 2019, Meleesha’s web series GUESTS was developed with the assistance of Film Victoria and the AMP Foundation’s Tomorrow Maker Award. NIGHTSHIFT, a short documentary project, was released in 2022.

Meleesha was Development Executive at Every Cloud Productions from 2021-2023 supported by Screen Australia Enterprise Funding and VicScreen’s Key Talent Placement Program.

Her original scripted series BHANG BHANG was optioned in 2021 and received Screen Australia Generate Funding. Meleesha worked with Hannah Samuel and Marieke Hardy to develop the show and wrote the pilot episode in 2023.

Since 2020, Meleesha has worked as a notetaker and, more recently, a story-liner in writers’ rooms for Matchbox Pictures, Fremantle Australia, Blackfella Films,  Cenzoic Pictures, Great Southern TV NZ, Bodhini Productions and 2Jons.

She holds a Masters of World Literatures in English from the University of Oxford and a Masters of Directing in Film and Television from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). She is currently completing a PhD in Political Science at the University of Melbourne which explores settler colonialism in post-Mabo Australia and post-apartheid South African laws and literatures.