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I’m Rachel Melvin — an actor, writer and creator who has spent most of my adult life telling stories. For a long time, they were mostly other people’s. These days, I’m increasingly interested in telling my own.

 

I was born outside Chicago, raised in Phoenix, and moved to Los Angeles at eighteen with very little money and the fairly unreasonable conviction that I was going to become an actor. Technically, I got there with the help of my grandmother and a lucky game of bingo — I won a jackpot while accompanying her to a casino and used the money to help fund my move. So apparently my career began with gambling. Grandma approved.

 

Somehow, it worked.

 

My breakout role as Chelsea Brady on NBC’s Days of Our Lives earned me two Daytime Emmy nominations and gave me several years of what may be the most intense acting education imaginable: learning, rehearsing and shooting television at an extraordinary pace, every day. From there, I moved between comedy, drama, studio films and independent work — appearing in Dumb and Dumber To, Zombeavers, Sleepy Hollow, Awkward, Chicago Med, Bones, House and Castle, among others.

 

But somewhere along the way, I became just as interested in the stories we tell about ourselves — particularly the stories women inherit about who we should be, what we should tolerate, how we should behave, and what happens when we stop cooperating with those expectations.That became How Bitches Are Made.

 

HBAM began as a script born from the ridiculous, painful and occasionally unbelievable stories of my own life, and became a podcast that examined the larger experience of being a woman. Today, it continues as an evolving body of work about identity, agency, relationships, reinvention and becoming the woman you may have put on hold somewhere along the way.

 

Acting and writing aren't the only ways I've been creating. I’ve spent portions of my life renovating houses, designing spaces, making art, thrifting, building businesses, creating videos and generally following my curiosity far enough to see where it leads.

 

For years, I thought those lives existed separately from one another, only now am I starting to realize how they're all coming together.

 

This is where all of them live.