Carol Monpere  

Born in Fresno, California, award-winning filmmaker Carol Monpere drew on her early years in the rural, Central Valley as inspiration for her work. After graduating high school in 1950, Monpere studied playwriting at Stanford University. She earned a bachelor's degree in three years and immediately began writing for a small Fresno television channel. Over many years, Monpere refined her skills, writing for stage and television, then expanding to film and documentaries.

After divorcing her first husband in the late 1960s, Monpere struggled to cultivate her art while raising her three children as a single mother, often exploring her situation through her art: this is most notable in the semi-autobiographical film, Pink Lightning, which she wrote and directed for Fox television in 1991. Monpere’s body of work also includes "The Battle of Westlands," which aired on PBS in 1980 and won both a George Foster Peabody Award and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. In 1977, Monpere’s film adaptation of "The Extraordinary Adventures of the Mouse and His Child," a novel by Russell Hoban, gained her much critical acclaim. In 2006, Carol Monpere succumbed to a seven-year battle with breast cancer. (07/09)