Founder, Owner & Head Photographer &

Melissa has spent her life pursuing her love of photography, after finishing her Bachelor of Arts with a Minor in Business. Melissa traveled the world taking pictures. From Peru to Italy to Indonesia, she then spent a year in Ireland under a Fulbright Scholarship where she taught photography as a therapeutic form of communication to deaf children. She returned to the States and moved to New York City where she ran a portrait studio, Classic Kids Manhattan, on the Upper East Side. Through her experience, which ranges from photographing athletes, celebrities, families, and children, she realized that working creatively with people is what makes her heart happiest. She landed in Chicago in 2011 and opened A Little Photo Studio to build on a decade and a half of following her passion. Melissa and her husband, Mike - along with their boys, Bennett and Owen, and their first "child", Koozie the dog - are happy fixtures in the Chicago community-centered entrepreneurship world. Their businesses, A Little Photo Studio and Heritage Bikes & Coffee, are blocks apart and take work-life integration to hyperlocal levels. Melissa is honored to be continually developing her style, creativity, family, and career simultaneously.