Melinda Songer Soderling is a creator, producer, dance scholar, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores how dance moves through media, culture, and memory. A performer whose career spanned Radio City Music Hall, international stadium tours with Latin pop icon Chayanne, and feature films including Showgirls, That Thing You Do, and Man on the Moon, she brings decades of insider experience to her research, teaching, and creative practice.

She is the co-creator and producer of the MOVE documentary archive, a two-decade oral history project capturing hundreds of stories and creative processes from dancers, choreographers, and directors whose work has shaped popular culture but has rarely been documented from within. A founding creator and board member of the Dance Hall of Fame, Soderling served as Producer for its inaugural awards ceremony in 2025.

Her current project, Inside the Industry: Dance, Media, Culture, is a research and teaching platform examining what happens when choreography moves from stage to screen. Her interactive media timeline, The Last 50 Years of Dance Media in Pop Culture, traces the evolution of screendance and serves as a core element of a developing syllabus created as part of her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She graduated summa cum laude from Saint Mary’s College of California with a degree in Performing Arts and received the LEAP Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Artistry, and Citizenship. She is also a guest lecturer at the University of California Irvine. 

At the heart of Soderling's work is a commitment to making visible the artists behind the movement—and ensuring their stories remain part of our cultural history.

Melinda serves on the President’s Circle Board at the Orange County School of the Arts and is a founding board member of the Dance Hall of Fame, championing dance history and education.