About the Founder

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Melanie's commitment to LGBTQ+ advocacy began well before her academic career. As a high school student in Plano, Texas she served for two years as the President of her high school's Gay-Straight Alliance and was a member of Youth First Texas. As an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, Stapleton held multiple leadership roles in Spectrum, the university's LGBTQ+ student organization, including serving as President and Classroom Panel Coordinator. During her tenure, she contributed to efforts to add gender identity and gender expression to the university's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, spoke in classrooms and public events, delivered the keynote address at LSU's 2014 Lavender Graduation, and helped establish Louisiana Trans Advocates, the state's first statewide nonprofit dedicated to transgender advocacy and support, as a founding board member. She later co-founded (Trans)position, an organization created to support transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive music educators.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, Stapleton taught elementary, middle, and high school music in Texas, primarily serving as a secondary choral director in the Houston area. Choirs under her direction consistently earned Sweepstakes and Superior ratings at UIL. She remains active as a clinician, guest lecturer, adjudicator, and consultant, bringing together practical classroom experience, choral expertise, scholarship, and lived experience. 

Stapleton holds a Master of Music Education from the University of North Texas, where her studies included work with conductors such as Dr. Allen Hightower and Dr. Jessica Nápoles. She earned a Bachelor of Music Education with a minor in English from Louisiana State University, where she sang in the LSU A Cappella Choir under Dr. Ken Fulton and served as President of the university's student chapter of the American Choral Directors Association. 

Her perspective is also influenced by professional experience beyond education and the arts. As a Quality Assurance tester for Electronic Arts, Stapleton was credited for her work on The Sims 3: Into the Future, and served as Mac Pod Lead on  The Sims 4. In that role, she led a specialized team of Mac testers and collaborated with developers at EA's Redwood Shores headquarters throughout the project. That work strengthened her skills in close analysis, technical documentation, collaborative problem-solving, and identifying how small problems within complex systems can affect the people navigating them. Her additional supervisory and customer-service experience across several companies has given her firsthand insight into workplace culture, organizational communication, and the ways inefficient systems can unintentionally create inequitable experiences for employees and customers.

Across her work, Stapleton is committed to making complex knowledge accessible, challenging harmful assumptions, and helping people and organizations align their practices with the communities they serve. She believes that education and the arts can foster connection and meaningful change when excellence, accountability, equity, and human dignity are treated as mutually reinforcing commitments.

Outside of her professional work, Melanie enjoys cooking, video games, discovering her next television obsession, finding the best new restaurants with friends, and hanging out with her Golden Retriever, Queso.