THE FOUNDER
Vanessa “Sessa” D’Amelio is a Bay Area-born scenester, producer, poet, photographer, and music journalist who’s been documenting the edges of culture since it was stapled to telephone poles and Xeroxed at 2 a.m. Raised in the sweaty, loud, DIY chaos of the 1980s mod and punk scenes, she cut her teeth passing out flyers, reading poetry in coffee shops, writing for zines and underground papers—often under funny pseudonyms to outmaneuver the bias baked into the scene she loved. All while documenting everything with her 1972 Pentax Spotmatic camera.
Fueled by a lifelong obsession with outsider art and off-the-grid storytelling, D’Amelio founded Destruct Construct in the ‘90s—a raw, Brechtian theater collective born from her time studying under legendary Beat poets David Meltzer and Neeli Cherkovski at New College of California. She holds an MFA from New College and an MA in Film from the Academy of Art University, but her real education came from thrift village, the library, record stores, alleyway shows, and radical print shops.
In 1995, she launched Sound Parlour on AOL, a punk-rooted media project and blog that captured the spirit of subculture through live performances, podcasts, video interviews, and raw storytelling straight from the mouths of scene legends, lifers, and lost voices.
As an executive producer with Chip Baker Films, she’s helped bring the chaotic beauty of punk to the screen in feature docs about The Clash, Johnny Thunders, Sid and Nancy, and uncredited contribution to Stiv and Brian Jones.
D’Amelio is also the founder of Pop Theory, a San Francisco-based production company built to work at the intersection of art, rebellion, and tech in 2003.
Vanessa lives in the Bay Area with her English husband— a professor, musicologist, engineer, painter, club promoter, and technologist—and their young son, a tiny chaos agent with a penchant for finger paint and feedback. Their home is filled with vinyl, wild ideas, their lovely dog, Tuppence, and the ghost of their beloved rescue cat, Keen.