Melissa Jones, MVHS alum ’98 and development director of Silicon Valley Shakespeare, a local theater company, is no stranger to the stage — throughout her career in community theater, she has acted in numerous productions, worked as a hair and makeup designer, directed productions and taught workshops and classes to local students. However, it wasn’t until she started high school that Jones found her love for theater.
Originally, Jones says her passion for performance stemmed from her love of music. As a high school freshman, she auditioned for the school musical because of her singing experience from taking choir in both middle and high school. Though she didn’t receive a part in the musical, she volunteered to work backstage and was hooked. Drawn to the tight-knit community, she began taking drama courses at MVHS the following year.
Jones says she wanted to pursue theater in college, but she and her parents believed the career seemed too unstable. However, when she realized that studying theater would give her numerous other skills like collaboration, coordination and teamwork that could translate to other pathways, she decided to continue her passion.
After Jones graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelor’s degree in theater, she found herself at a corporate marketing job, performing in community theater in the evenings, but feeling dissatisfied. In 2006, she started working at SVS as both an actor and a hair and makeup designer, then joined part-time as the education director in 2009. In 2018, she began working full-time as the development director where she organized the company’s fundraising.
SVS executive director Annalisa Tkacheff, who joined SVS in 2019 as a managing director, is the only full-time staff member at the company along with Jones. As a result, Tkacheff says she works closely with Jones and has experienced Jones’ commitment to her job firsthand.
“We’ve gotten closer over the years, and it’s really impressed upon me how passionate she is about the arts,” Tkacheff said. “She does such a good job of speaking directly to the people that she’s writing about and writing to and getting to the heart of an issue. She’s such a lovely person, and she’s so great at what she does. I don’t know what I would do without her.”
According to Jones, one of the ways she connects with the community is through her deep commitment to inclusivity in theater. Her MVHS drama teacher believed that certain roles in shows could be played by actors of different ethnicities, even if the role called for a different ethnicity than the actor. However, when she left high school, she says she was unsure if there would be any roles for Asian actors like herself.
“When I started auditioning for community theaters in college and outside of a school setting, I did occasionally get comments from directors who meant very well but would say things like, ‘Oh, I really wanted to cast you in this role, but they’re part of a family unit, and I didn’t have enough Asian actors to make everyone in the family Asian,’ or, ‘You needed to be the sister or the daughter of somebody else,’” Jones said. “There were other comments where I know that they meant well, and that they were trying to give me a compliment, saying, ‘We really liked the work that you did, but you were not ethnically the right fit.’ But it still hurts to hear that.”
Though Jones notes that casting in recent times has become more diverse, she says this is still not always the case. As a result, one personal requirement she has adopted is not performing in productions with fewer than 30% BIPOC actors, and she says SVS has a commitment to casting a minimum of 50% BIPOC actors and 50% female or nonbinary actors across each season. SVS education associate Kunal Prasad agrees, saying that his and Jones’ shared experience as Asian actors and Jones’ commitment to diversity were factors he especially connected with when he interviewed for his position.
“She’s been such an advocate for being inclusive because she understands the frustration and hurt that comes with being excluded,” Prasad said. “Theater can be pretty intimate, so having theater that reflects its own audience makes sense and is understandable, but it’s funny to me that there often has to be an Asian-specific theater in order for there to be any kind of Asian representation on stage.”
Tkacheff adds how Jones has started putting together festivals before their summer performances to bring the community together. For example, before SVS’s all-women and nonbinary production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” Jones organized a night where they invited women and nonbinary businesses to speak and connect with the community.
Surrounded by a supportive community and working in entertainment, Tkacheff notes that many people outside of the theater world believe their job is fun and easy. However, she says, the invisible challenges of running a theater company, like finding funding, can make the job feel unrewarding. As support for the arts declines and federal funding for live theater is pulled, Jones’ fundraising position becomes increasingly important.
“I would say that her superpower is being able to reframe a situation,” Tkacheff said. “We’ve lost a lot of funding this year, but instead of just saying, ‘Oh well,’ we sat down together, and she completely redid what our strategy was going to be for bringing money in in 2026. She has such an innate ability to pivot and say, ‘OK, what can we do next?’ instead of feeling bogged down or really stressed about things not going well.”
Rather than focusing all of her attention on fundraising, however, Jones has been expanding her range of skills, making her directorial debut in 2024 with her interpretation of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors.” Seeing the parallels between the play, which follows a family separated by immigration and experiences of Chinese immigrants during the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1912, Jones set the play in San Francisco’s Chinatown and primarily cast AAPI actors, not only reflecting the community they were performing to, but also her Chinese heritage.
Tkacheff notes that Jones was nervous about the experience, due to the many responsibilities that come with being a director — while an actor often only needs to focus on their own role, a director has to create the whole vision of the performance themselves. However, Tkacheff says Jones clearly conveyed her vision to both the actors and the audience, leading to its success.
“She stepped up into the role and she knocked it out of the park,” Tkacheff said. “It was one of the most successful shows at Sanborn Park that we have ever had. Her passion just showed through, her vision was absolutely beautiful and she did a great job facing her fears.”
When Jones reflects on how different her life would be if she never discovered her love for theater she knows that she made the right decision deciding to pursue theater in high school. Ultimately, through her work in SVS, especially her former role as an education director, she hopes to create a space where students with an interest in theater can thrive creatively.
“I think every middle and high schooler understands what it is like to struggle as your social structures start to shift,” Jones said. “Sometimes your friend groups start to shift, your expectations of yourself or your family’s expectations of you shift, and it can be hard to navigate that. Even if you have a good support system, you can feel alone. I was really lucky that I had a number of arts teachers who created safe spaces, who said, ‘You have value, you have skill, you want to create, let’s make a place where you can feel like you can be yourself and bring all of yourself to this space.’ I wanted to give that back to everybody. I wanted to be able to create environments like that for other people.”
