Melissa Brown is a staff attorney with the National Advertising Division (NAD) of BBB National Programs and joined NAD in September 2021 with a background in intellectual property and media law. She was a Visiting Scholar in Intellectual Property at Columbia Law School and then of counsel to the IP and commercial litigation boutique Leichtman Law. Melissa is the founder and co-director for development of the forthcoming Visual Arts Infringement Project, designed for Columbia's Kernochan Center for Law, Media & the Arts as a copyright resource for the law and arts communities. Prior to her work in intellectual property, Melissa was a documentary film producer and served as production counsel and/or co-producer to a number of director producers, including twice Oscar nominated director Jonathan Stack ('The Wildest Show in the South: The Angola Prison Rodeo'; 'The Farm' ) and director Gee Linton on the Director's Cut of the Lionsgate feature 'Exposed' starring Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas. She began her career as a ballerina and spent several years in Europe working in the fashion industry. Melissa speaks French fluently and holds a B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is a longstanding member of New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) and a member of the Fashion Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association.