Melissa Riker is the Artistic Director/Choreographer of Kinesis Project dance theatre where she, and her collaborators, create large scale dance performances in public spaces. Kinesis Project has core company members in NYC and in Seattle, and the company regularly performs in both cities.

Melissa is also the Executive Director of the EstroGenius Festival and founding co-producer of Women in Motion, both are performance and development platforms celebrating and supporting women and non-binary artists. In 2020, in reaction to the sudden closure of the dance field, Riker founded Dance Rising a collective of dance artists and administrators that uses performance as activism and advocates for the dance field of NYC.