Melissa Chimera is a Hawai‘i-born conservationist and artist whose work explores species extinction, globalization, and human migration. Melissa has a BA in natural resources management from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and has worked in Pacific Island land stewardship and environmental education since 1996. She is the co-host and creator of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa podcast Land and People and has exhibited her artwork across the U.S., Asia, and the Middle East. She is the recipient of the Catherine E. B. Cox Award and a finalist for the Duke University Lange-Taylor Prize in documentary studies. Her perspective concerning the Maui wildfires and her work on immigrant narratives has been mentioned in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Hyperallergic. In 2022, Chimera was the 2022 Anchorage Museum artist-in-residence and a Mikhail Endowment grantee at the University of Toledo for her work on immigrant narratives. Her work is held in the collections of the Arab American National Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.