Rockhurst University

Director of Recruiting  -  Co-Founder of Q3 Quest   -  Consultant & Speaker

Skills: Full-life Cycle Recruiting · Digital Strategy · Digital Marketing · Strategic Planning · Talent Management · Business Planning · Team Management · Business Development

The Hired Guns

Managing Partner / Director of Recruiting 

From Elixir: 
Melea is intensely curious about human nature. She tends to delve across
disciplines, nimbly moving beyond assumed boundaries. This cross-
pollination gives her more material and experiences to mine when she’s
planning a social media campaign, content strategy or audience
development rollout. 

Melea’s mission is always the same: to create meaning between an
audience, customer, or consumer and the business or organization trying
to reach them. She is known for leveraging existing networks to achieve
authentic lasting engagement, both online and off. Melea views digital
experiences as an extension of real life, and the content strategies she
develops are notoriously successful at blending the two. Her Internet
sleuthiness enables her to identify and enlist as emissaries the leaders and
influencers of the target market.

Melea spent the first seven years of her career in academic book
publishing, ultimately as a Sociology editor. She then moved into business
development for a global consulting firm that used tools of the theater
within organizations. In 2007, she combined these two experiences and
became a communications and strategy consultant to a broad mix of
clients: small business owners, artists, writers, entrepreneurs and large
brands. In addition to content strategy, Melea has worked on brainstorming
projects, product naming, and ghost writing (whose roots, she likes to point
out, are narrative and connection with a given audience in mind). Melea’s
sixth sense, or sensibility, influences her approach to all aspects of
communication.

When not working, Melea can be found with her dogs, camping in the
woods, performing improvisational storytelling or written work, and riding
fat tire bikes on the beach at low tide in Alaska.

Elixir Design

Resident Content Strategist 

Board of Us brings groups of strangers together to work on their own businesses, careers, and lives. It is a facilitation tool and game-based play for personal and professional development.

Board of Us | Q3 Speaking + Consulting

Founder

Director of Recruiting & Consultant 

Talent Agent & Consultant 

I developed a memento mori clock called The Wander Clock for myself to mark the time that I had lived as long without my mother as with her. Using the constraints of time, attention, money and relationships, I created a body of work over the course of six years that included storytelling prompts, writing projects, community-building, and performances in the US and Europe. I developed The Wander Clock into a curriculum for others that was truly a delight. Twelve students at a time designed their own Wander Clocks through group facilitation and experimentation prompts.

Portland Underground Grad School

Adjunct Faculty

The Attic Institute

Atheneum Fellow - Class of 2013

North Star Fund

Board of Directors

Classes taught include: 
- E-Commerce Content Strategy 
- Organic Search Strategy
- Social Media Strategy I and II 
- Digital Analytics 
- Blogging & Social Media Content Strategy
- Business and Deal Negotiation with Melea Seward & David Colby

Fashion Institute of Technology

Adjunct Professor

As the Marketing and Business Development Director for Performance of a Lifetime, I sold theater-based executive education to Learning & Development and HR teams at Fortune 100 and 500 companies, NGOs, non-profit organizations and hospitals and healthcare institutions. 

We helped design and deliver programs to help leaders grow, foster better client relationships, deal with difficult conversations, navigate ethical issues in business, increase diversity, foster team building, and more. The methodology is theater: acting, improvising, directing, and playwriting. Clients include Booz Allen Hamilton, Citigroup, Duke, Infosys, Johns Hopkins Oncology Department, the US Olympic Committee, Heifer International, and many more with program delivery happening all over the world.

Performance of a Lifetime

Director of Business Development

I produced conferences from ideation to execution. I interviewed thought leaders, researched topics, recruited experts, developed content, and marketed events for conferences in the financial, legal, and insurance sectors. Conferences included Middle Market Mergers and Acquisitions and Intellectual Property Rights for Financial Services and Insurance Professionals.

Institute for International Research

Senior Conference Producer

Acquisitions and Developmental Editor for Norton's Sociology and Astronomy Lists working with authors including Dalton Conley, Mitchell Duneier, Richard Appelbaum, Jeff Hester and more.

- Acquired the #1 selling Sociology textbook, You May Ask Yourself, now in its seventh edition. https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393537789

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Editor

- Responsible for closing large adoptions of Norton's Sociology and Astronomy list. 
- Scouting new acquisitions in the field. 
- Training the sales team on the competitive landscape, selling Norton's sociology and astronomy list.
- Creating sales materials and support to reps in the US and Canada.
- Preparing large-scale presentations to influence the sales team and ultimately close business.

Managed and increased a $1M (+$40% YoY) sales territory including Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.

North America Marketing Manager / College Traveler (NYC & Nova Scotia)

Covered a Midwest sales territory (Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, and South Dakota) as the Norton, New Press, Verso Press, and Thames & Hudson representative for colleges and universities. Worked with adoption committees to close large orders as well as servicing existing adoptions across Norton's full academic list: Anthropology, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, English, History, Music, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Statistics.