Melissa Hunter Gurney’s work explores the relationships between culture, ecology, land, and learning. She is the Co-Founder and President of the Lo—TEK Institute, where she leads educational strategy, curriculum development, and institutional partnerships that cultivate planetary literacy grounded in ancestral knowledge. Through collaborations with schools, universities, museums, governments, and cultural institutions, she develops learning experiences that position ancestral ecological intelligence and living technologies as essential knowledge for addressing today's environmental challenges.

She is also the Co-Founder of Black Land Ownership, a grassroots initiative advancing land justice through education, advocacy, and community-based action. The organization works to address the historical dispossession of people of African descent while fostering broader conversations about land, human rights, environmental stewardship, and equitable access to place.

For more than two decades, Melissa has served as an educational leader in public, private, and international secondary schools across the United States and Latin America. Her approach to education centers dialogue, critical inquiry, and the cultivation of relationships between people, place, and the living world.

Alongside her educational work, Melissa is a fiction writer whose work explores Pan-American women, artists, migration, memory, and belonging. Across all of her work, she is interested in how stories, knowledge systems, and education can cultivate more reciprocal relationships with one another and the Earth.