Monica's illustrious media career started on the other side of the microphone, as a child prodigy on AM radio. She was discovered by New York's WWRL, when she sang (live and on-air) that Christmas favorite: "Kling Glöckchen Klingelingeling" a-ling, a-ling, ling, etc., which, of course, she performed in the original German.

"For a day I was the most famous little girl in a five block radius surrounding my parent's apartment on Upper East Side."

Still, she had made it in New York, and if you can make it there, you can bet you can make it in the TV business.

Monica Lange is known in documentary circles as a spot-on, cut-to-the-chase producer. For more than two decades, she has quarterbacked some of the best film and video on TV.  In 2001 and 2002 she was producer and director for Bill Moyers's two-hour award winning tale "America's First River: Stories From the Hudson," which The New York Times called "a richly textured vision of a river's effect on a country's history, art, literature and environmental politics."

Monica is modest, but sooner or later, the truth has to come out. She has made scores of films and TV shows. And she feels equally comfortable directing Kevin Bacon or interviewing a prisoner in his cell.  "You sure learn a lot in this business," she says. "On America in the Forties for PBS, the ladies of Mobile, Alabama taught me about the heightened romance of kissing a boy that was 'fixin to go to war.' When I did Conjoined Twins After Separation for TLC I learned what it meant to face life with only half a body. In short, this is no ordinary job, and if you can hack it, you'll have a lot to talk about when you move to the old age home."

More recently, in 2008 and 2009, she produced, directed and wrote four documentaries for Discovery Communications. One of those shows, about the crucial and controversial subject of autism won the prestigious "Television With a Conscience Award" from the TV Academy of Arts and Sciences (the Emmy people).

Born in New York City, she attended the University of Rochester, where she did not sing with the school's nationally renowned all female a cappella group. By then, the voice had gone the way of her pigtails. In fact, she can no longer hold a tune.  What she can do however, besides making award-winning shows, is whip up a mean meal. …Persian Rice with Duck Confit, perhaps? And, in spite of her self-professed "shyness," she kills in Charades -- every time.