Melissa Chimera is a Honolulu native of Lebanese and Filipino ancestry. She studied Natural Resources Management at the University of Hawai`i, while painting and mentoring under Hawai`i painters Peggy Chun and later George Allan and Tony Walholm.  She currently exhibits on Maui and `Oahu.  Her work is in national and international private and public collections.

Her inspiration as an artist is rare plants that she and her husband, a botanist, encounter in remote places.  She moved to Maui to protect Nature Conservancy forests and now leads volunteers into the wilds of Haleakalā National Park.  Chimera’s past decade as a conservation manager confirms that people who love Hawai`i mistakenly identify it with plants from other places, like the Costa Rican plumeria flower.  Most people don’t know the flowers she paints.  They are unaware that the subjects of her canvases are the first kama`āina (islanders) before the Hawaiians got here. Hawai`i remains the world's epicenter for plant and animal extinction.

That Chimera’s family fled war in Lebanon also brings a unique insight into life and death for the artist.  The suffering of her grandfather’s people continues in many parts of the mid-east today.  Chimera’s work also explores the similar fate of middle eastern peoples, as well as Hawaiians and their flora, all of which are at once endangered yet resilient in the face of change.  The real Hawai`i – a place of forgotten flowers and people, of devastation and recovery – is truly veiled by the myth of paradise.