Writer • Director • Producer • Teacher • Creator
Creator of MIDDLEHOOD
Visiting Professor, Columbia University
Independent Television Pioneer
Hers is a life lived fully — on both sides of the camera, on both sides of the Atlantic, and in every kitchen she has ever loved.
Now she’s changing television with MIDDLEHOOD, the comedy-drama series she wrote, directed, and produced. The first truly independent television series ever made in the United States. The first of its kind ever considered for the Emmy Award and the SAG-AFTRA Actor Awards. Streaming now.
Michele Palermo lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
About
Michele Palermo is a creator, a writer, a wife, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, and a friend. Someone who has spent her life finding ways to bring stories to life on stage and screen, big and small.
She grew up between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Rome, Italy — including one year in an Italian school where she arrived not speaking a word of the language and finished second in her class, which explains a great deal about her. After college she moved to Washington, DC to work as a French and Italian translator at a law firm while building her career as an actress. She earned her Master’s degree in International Communication at American University.
Before any of that, she spent time in New York as head writer on the premiere season of The Martha Stewart Show — researching, as she will tell you with complete sincerity, such riveting topics as compost, tomatoes, and how to wash your dog. Pages and pages of bullet points. She has never composted since.
She has, however, served as Chief of Staff to the First Lady of Virginia, produced USO tours around the globe, and turned down many offers to open a restaurant. According to her friends, she is one of the great cooks of her generation.
It was in New York, in a small apartment on West 51st Street, that she began writing plays with her husband Paul. Her first play was Ladies in Waiting. Those early plays were published by Samuel French. West 51st Street Productions — her first production company, named after that apartment — was born there too. She now rents in that same building every spring when she returns to teach at Columbia. Some addresses stay with you.
She came to Los Angeles after being cast in the film Broadcast News. She played William Hurt’s makeup person — her scenes with him in the makeup room before the famous emergency broadcast were cut from the finished film. She discovered this at the LA premiere.
What remained was a single line, delivered on stage after the broadcast: “Congratulations, Tom.” She stayed in Los Angeles anyway. She has never entirely stopped being grateful for that cut, because what came next was more interesting than anything Hollywood had planned for her.
Television found Michele the way the best things do — unexpectedly. A TV executive saw the premiere production of Ladies in Waiting and recruited her into the industry. A published and award-winning playwright focused on telling women’s stories, she went on to write myriad pilots and episodes, develop series with Peter Horton and David E. Kelley, and sell The Mansion — an upstairs/downstairs dramedy set in a Governor’s mansion — to Lifetime Television. She wrote for a network primetime series. She pitched in more rooms than she can count. She also wrote, produced, and directed two award-winning independent features, Ladies in Waiting and the mockumentary Unreel: A True Hollywood Story, as well as the popular web series Chapin Circle.
And when Hollywood couldn’t find a box for the show she needed to make next, she made it herself. MIDDLEHOOD — written, directed, produced, and edited entirely by Michele, all eight episodes — became the first truly independent television series ever made in the United States, and the first of its kind ever considered for the Emmy Award and the SAG-AFTRA Actor Awards. It is streaming now.
In addition to continuing to write, direct, and produce, Michele is training the next generation of storytellers at Columbia University, at La Fémis in Paris, and at FAMU, the Czech national film school in Prague — teaching them what she had to learn the hard way: that the table already exists, you are allowed to sit at it, and if no one will pull out your chair, you build your own.
About
Michele Palermo is a creator, a writer, a wife, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, and a friend. Someone who has spent her life finding ways to bring stories to life on stage and screen, big and small.
She grew up between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Rome, Italy — including one year in an Italian school where she arrived not speaking a word of the language and finished second in her class, which explains a great deal about her. After college she moved to Washington, DC to work as a French and Italian translator at a law firm while building her career as an actress. She earned her Master’s degree in International Communication at American University.
Before any of that, she spent time in New York as head writer on the premiere season of The Martha Stewart Show — researching, as she will tell you with complete sincerity, such riveting topics as compost, tomatoes, and how to wash your dog. Pages and pages of bullet points. She has never composted since.
She has, however, served as Chief of Staff to the First Lady of Virginia, produced USO tours around the globe, and turned down many offers to open a restaurant. According to her friends, she is one of the great cooks of her generation.
It was in New York, in a small apartment on West 51st Street, that she began writing plays with her husband Paul. Her first play was Ladies in Waiting. Those early plays were published by Samuel French. West 51st Street Productions — her first production company, named after that apartment — was born there too. She now rents in that same building every spring when she returns to teach at Columbia. Some addresses stay with you.
She came to Los Angeles after being cast in the film Broadcast News. She played William Hurt’s makeup person — her scenes with him in the makeup room before the famous emergency broadcast were cut from the finished film. She discovered this at the LA premiere.
What remained was a single line, delivered on stage after the broadcast: “Congratulations, Tom.” She stayed in Los Angeles anyway. She has never entirely stopped being grateful for that cut, because what came next was more interesting than anything Hollywood had planned for her.
Television found Michele the way the best things do — unexpectedly. A TV executive saw the premiere production of Ladies in Waiting and recruited her into the industry. A published and award-winning playwright focused on telling women’s stories, she went on to write myriad pilots and episodes, develop series with Peter Horton and David E. Kelley, and sell The Mansion — an upstairs/downstairs dramedy set in a Governor’s mansion — to Lifetime Television. She wrote for a network primetime series. She pitched in more rooms than she can count. She also wrote, produced, and directed two award-winning independent features, Ladies in Waiting and the mockumentary Unreel: A True Hollywood Story, as well as the popular web series Chapin Circle.
And when Hollywood couldn’t find a box for the show she needed to make next, she made it herself. MIDDLEHOOD — written, directed, produced, and edited entirely by Michele, all eight episodes — became the first truly independent television series ever made in the United States, and the first of its kind ever considered for the Emmy Award and the SAG-AFTRA Actor Awards. It is streaming now.
In addition to continuing to write, direct, and produce, Michele is training the next generation of storytellers at Columbia University, at La Fémis in Paris, and at FAMU, the Czech national film school in Prague — teaching them what she had to learn the hard way: that the table already exists, you are allowed to sit at it, and if no one will pull out your chair, you build your own.
The Show
Hailed by Women’s World as “your newest obsession.”
Lisa Giordano-Navarro is fifty years old, first-generation American, the only girl and the middle child of an Italian-German immigrant family. Her marriage is over. Her job is gone. And she is home for the holidays with the lively, loving, exhausting Giordano clan — navigating who she is, where she came from, and what comes next. It is funny. It is moving. It is the midlife nobody makes television about.
Starring NYC International Film Festival Best Actress winner Elena Wohl and veteran actor Mark Damon Espinoza, with special guest star Gabrielle Carteris — reunited on screen for the first time since Beverly Hills, 90210 with Espinoza.
Eight episodes. 51 actors. 34 shoot days. Written, directed, produced, and edited entirely by Michele Palermo. The first truly independent television series ever made in the United States. The first of its kind ever considered for the Emmy Award and the SAG-AFTRA Actor Awards.
— Viewer, England
Online Course
Writing is not a talent. It is a practice. And the greatest obstacle between you and the page is not ability — it is the voice in your head that tells you to wait until it’s perfect, wait until you’re ready, wait until someone gives you permission.
Finding Your Inner Writer is a ten-week online course designed to silence that voice and help you find yours. Drawing on Michele’s decades of experience as a working writer, playwright, television creator, and Columbia University professor, this course gives you the tools, the community, and the accountability to finally do the work.
You will write. Every week. In community. With guidance from someone who has done it — and kept doing it — through every obstacle life throws in the way.
Online Course
Writing is not a talent. It is a practice. And the greatest obstacle between you and the page is not ability — it is the voice in your head that tells you to wait until it’s perfect, wait until you’re ready, wait until someone gives you permission.
Finding Your Inner Writer is a ten-week online course designed to silence that voice and help you find yours. Drawing on Michele’s decades of experience as a working writer, playwright, television creator, and Columbia University professor, this course gives you the tools, the community, and the accountability to finally do the work.
You will write. Every week. In community. With guidance from someone who has done it — and kept doing it — through every obstacle life throws in the way.
Consulting
Michele has spent decades learning what they don’t teach you — in film school, in writers rooms, or in any development meeting. Pre-production, production, post-production, budgeting, distribution, screenplay development, pilot writing. The full arc of independent filmmaking and theater, from the first idea to the final cut.
She has done this work as a favor for people she believed in. Now she is making it available more broadly — not as a business, but as another form of teaching. Another way of passing on what took years to learn.
If you are an independent filmmaker, a writer developing a pilot or screenplay, or a theater maker trying to figure out how to get your project made, she is happy to talk.
Consulting is available on a paid basis. Rates are discussed upon inquiry.
Speaking
She is the girl who was put into an Italian fifth grade classroom without speaking a word of Italian — and finished the year second in her class. She has been figuring out how to build the table on the fly ever since.
Michele Palermo has lived a life that defies a single category. Milwaukee and Rome. A law firm in DC and a dinner theater in Virginia. Head writer for Martha Stewart. Chief of Staff to the First Lady of Virginia. A single line in Broadcast News and the first truly independent television series ever made in the United States.
She speaks about all of it — the independent filmmaking journey, the art of reinventing yourself in midlife, the very specific terror of finally making the project you have always dreamed of, and what happens when you stop waiting for permission and start building your own table.
She is available for universities, film festivals, industry panels, women’s organizations, and private events.
Pre-production, production, post-production, budgeting, distribution
One-on-one development with a working writer-director and professor
the page to the stage
Speaking
She is the girl who was put into an Italian fifth grade classroom without speaking a word of Italian — and finished the year second in her class. She has been figuring out how to build the table on the fly ever since.
Michele Palermo has lived a life that defies a single category. Milwaukee and Rome. A law firm in DC and a dinner theater in Virginia. Head writer for Martha Stewart. Chief of Staff to the First Lady of Virginia. A single line in Broadcast News and the first truly independent television series ever made in the United States.
She speaks about all of it — the independent filmmaking journey, the art of reinventing yourself in midlife, the very specific terror of finally making the project you have always dreamed of, and what happens when you stop waiting for permission and start building your own table.
She is available for universities, film festivals, industry panels, women’s organizations, and private events.
Contact
Whether you’re interested in the writing course, consulting, a speaking engagement, or just want to say you watched MIDDLEHOOD and loved it — Michele wants to hear from you.
Contact
Whether you’re interested in the writing course, consulting, a speaking engagement, or just want to say you watched MIDDLEHOOD and loved it — Michele wants to hear from you.