Melissa Coffey

Melissa Began her aerial training in 2006 at Canopy Studios in Athens, GA. She was heavily involved in art, music and design her whole life without being very physical except for dancing in night clubs. She tried on some yoga classes and dance classes for a couple years and then found trapeze classes. Aerial dance was so captivating to her that she drove out of town faithfully every weekend to take trapeze classes even though at first she couldn’t get her feet to the bar, had a latent fear of heights, and a few years prior could not touch her own toes. Soon enough, aerial studios opened in Atlanta where she took classes several times a week from Liana Repass of Entanglement, Carrie Heller and Kasumi Kato at Circus Arts Institute and Nicole Merman from The Dair Project. Already a performer, it was only a year before someone convinced her to get in front of an audience on trapeze, and she became an aerial performer. Melissa picked up silks and lyra and double silks, double trap, and double lyra over the years, and then began to invent her own apparatuses. She travels to augment her instruction, in Vegas, California, the Caribbean and more, and will be seeking the up and coming certifications that are being developed.

She has published the first DVD that teaches basic trapeze vocabulary . She is Co-Founder of Kinetic Hive- a cross pollination studio for movement arts, and honored to be a trainer at Sky Gym. She loves to coach and choreograph and create characters with her students as she sees them grow into their abilities.

As a trainer, Melissa has developed her own modalities for teaching and believes this to be one mark of a safe teacher who invests time, thought, and experience into their students. Each class attendee is given a sheet per class listing their vocabulary, specific conditioning goals for that vocabulary, and specific choreography based on what they know already. She teaches some public classes, but mostly likes to focus with students individually in Private and Semi Private instruction to shape each person.

Melissa also teaches at festivals around North and Central America, and hosts her own aerial retreats in January and February every year in Costa Rica!