Monica S. Hunter is a California native. She hales from southern California where she received a B.A. in Radio, TV and Film from Cal State Long Beach, followed by a Ph.D. from UCLA specializing in cultural anthropology. Monica’s early work involved educational television, producing three documentary series for PBS broadcast. She began work in museums during her graduate studies at UCLA, joining the curation staff of the Los Angeles Maritime Museum where she put her research and curatorial skills to work. Merging her experience in educational media with museum exhibitry, she centered her curatorial interests on historical dimensions of California including the maritime trade and transportation of the Gold Rush era as well as the Mission period, commercial and recreational fishing, sailing and yachting, and fine art. She also conducted curation of two major photo collections including the archives of the Long Beach Harbor Department, as well as the Robert A. Weinstein private photo collection.

For the last decade Monica has applied her anthropological and ethnographic training in her work on grassroots community engagement at the local, regional and national scale to support emerging areas of formal and informal education and school design for 21st century learning. Her interest in community engagement also extends to the environmental policy arena where she has used her skills to support public processes focused on sustaining environmental viability of agricultural regions of the central coast.

Monica received a governor’s appointment to the California State Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board serving for the past 16 years as a board member, including four years as Vice Chair. Monica continues to explore her love of photography and enjoys the ease of on-the-go digital technologies that allow her to document the world as she encounters it.