Melissa Chimera is a Hawai‘i-born conservationist and artist of Lebanese and Filipino ancestry. Her environmental education and land-care work of the past thirty years informs her paintings, installations, and collaborative projects, which deal with extinction, globalization, and human migration. She is the co-creator of the University of Hawaiʻi podcast Land and People, which documents the evolving relationships of Hawai‘i people to the land upon which they work and live. Chimera’s work can be found in public and private collections. Her work has been awarded the Catherine E. B. Cox Award in visual art and was noted as a finalist for the Duke University Lange-Taylor Prize in documentary studies. Most recently, she was Anchorage Museum’s artist-in-residence and University of Toledo’s Mikhail Endowment grantee for her work concerning immigrant narratives.
Ms. Aligned 