Michael Seligman
I am a writer, director and producer with a passion for true stories…
I’ve been a storyteller ever since I was a kid, growing up on Long Island.
I moved to Hollywood after college and since then, I’ve worked on a variety of TV series including the Emmy Award-winning RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE, E! TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORY and MYSTERIES & SCANDALS, a docu-series that explored the underside of fame in Hollywood’s Golden Age.
In 2019, I co-created and co-hosted the original podcast MOB QUEENS, a documentary-style series exploring the little-known life of Anna Genovese, a bi-sexual, bad-ass mob wife who ran New York City’s most notorious drag clubs in the 1950s and 60s. The series debuted at #5 on the iTunes True Crime chart.
In 2020, I made my directorial debut (the culmination of a 5-year passion project) with the feature documentary film, P.S. BURN THIS LETTER PLEASE. The movie begins with the discovery of box of letters, written in the 1950s by a group of New York City drag queens, then follows the lives of 9 former queens, now in their 80s and 90s, as they relive their most daring and defiant moments. The film was invited to premiere at the 2020 TriBeCa Film Festival and accepted to dozens of other festivals around the globe.
My curiosity and love of untold history, combined with my desire to advance LGBTQ+ education, inspired my next project — the podcast series CHEERS QUEERS!, which explores the colorful, curious and often courageous lives of the world's least-known queers — currently in development.
“P.S. Burn This Letter Please”
“Brash, bedazzling, sweet and poignant… a delightful and affecting oral history, chronicling a specifically New York chapter in the story of gay life in the United States.”
-The Hollywood Reporter
“A moving and uplifting tribute to the beauty, bravery and defiant self-expression of these truly fierce, trailblazing queens.”
-The Queer Review
“A crucial, necessary work.”
-The Young Folks
“A delight of a drag kiki.”
-The Film Experience
“Mob Queens”
“One of the secrets to Mob Queens’ appeal is that Jessica Bendinger and Michael Seligman don’t pretend to be seen-it-all journalists. Rather, the podcast has an engaging ‘join-us-on-our-journey’ quality that feels born of an intimacy between two friends who met 20 years ago…”
-The Los Angeles Times
“Mob Queens… is a rich picture of a New Yorker who was far more than just a ‘mob wife.’”
-The New York Times
