Outside the box, untamable actress Sonya Mellah burns with a fiercely feminine energy, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge, culture and connecting with others. A polyglot, she speaks French, Italian, English, Arabic and Hebrew.
Born and raised in Paris, she grew up in the café owned by her parents on the Place de la République. There, as young Sonya washed coffee cups behind the bar, listening to the stories told by the regulars, she developed her imagination, her taste for writing and her love for underdog characters.
She loves poetry, Italian cinema, jazz music, wearing sexy tuxedos and riding Vespas to the Moroccan desert. She sees the world through a multifaceted, cosmopolitan lens – a hybrid mosaic made available for you to peruse on this website. A citizen of the world, Sonya has nonetheless found her heart’s home in Italy and its cinema.

Sonya Mellah’s warm, sensual, evocative, mysterious and velvety voice has naturally found its place on Fip radio’s waves (she is the voice of the radio’s slogan). In between music programmes, her announcements conjure up jazz, world music, theatre and poetry. As a trained actress, Sonya knows how to tune her voice to a wider range of tones – dedicated, reassuring, motherly, journalistic or sharp – she has lent her voice to documentaries, radio dramas, dubbing and commercials.

Trained on the stage, Sonya Mellah first studied acting under the tutelage of Jean Perimony and ballet dancing with Elisa Freitas Machado. She has worked on the roles of Celimène in Molière’s Misanthrope, the Marquise Cibo in Musset’s Lorenzaccio, Sonia in Life x 3 (Trois Versions de la vie) by Yasmina Reza as well as the role of Nawal in Sorched (Incendies) by Wajdi Mouawad. In Brussels, she performs in a comical one-woman show, Beaucoup de choses à vous Djire, written by Souad Belhaddad and directed by Laetitia de Fombelle. She is currently taking part in the creation of a performance about Clarice Lispector’s life and work.

Sonya Mellah writes playful culture segments for French radio Fip. She recently wrote an album called Rhythm is in my heart – a record combining poems and percussions for the National Orchestra of Ile-de-France. She has defended her Masters’ thesis on Italian cinema at the Department of Italian Studies of Paris Nanterre University, and is working on her first feature-length film script.