About the Author    

Renee Prince was one of only a few women dolphin trainers in the country shortly after she started college, and worked with her dolphins in a lab doing the first of the early cognitive studies of dolphins.  Her fields of study for her undergraduate work at the University of California at San Diego and her graduate work at San Diego State University included experimental and cognitive psychology, human information processing, and eventually a special graduate seminar on concepts in consciousness.  At the same time, Renee began her years of study in the martial art of Aikido, taking to heart many of its Taoist precepts and spiritual insights. She graduated with high honors from both universities, earning her Masters degree in experimental psychology.  This rich and wide-ranging field, as well as her involvement in programming the first computer networks provided the author with a strong background in science and the scientific method, which she used to advantage in her later research on orcas with Alex Hubbard Morton, who is one of the most respected orca researchers today.

Renee coauthored with Alex one of the chapters in the seminal book Behavioral Biology of Killer Whales (Alan R. Liss, Inc., New York, 1986), and coauthored several research papers on human learning and memory while earning her Masters degree.  Renee has been featured in articles about dolphin research in such magazines as International Wildlife and in Alex’s latest book, Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us (Ballantine, New York, 2002).

When funding for work with dolphins became scarce, Renee began writing on a range of subjects, including reviews of plays, political battles between citizens and their utility company, and travel.  Her investigative journalism features for the popular San Diego Reader eventually landed her a cover story.  While she continued to write, she also worked full time as a sculptor and designer for a company that produced giant inflatable characters, creatures, and product replicas.  Some say this is where Renee finally began to develop a sense of humor.

Eventually Renee parlayed this rather bizarre job into a more long lasting career in Los Angeles working as an artist for feature films, and her sculpting and scenic art is a part of some thirty-plus features, including The Abyss, Rose Red, and Army of Darkness.

Following a move to the Northwest hoping to concentrate more on writing, Renee began writing and research for two nonfiction books while she worked on advancing her career in film, eventually earning a position as art director and then production designer on several films in Oregon and Washington.  Between film projects, she wrote articles and essays reflecting her own interests in spiritual questions, new science, environment, and consciousness. Her insistence on continuing to make learning and study a part of her life has kept her current with the best science writing of our times, including physics, psychology, animal behavior, neurobiology, and paranormal phenomena as well as dolphin research.

 Her interest in physics, psychology and consciousness helped her land a position on the film that became What the Bleep Do We Know, and led to her current work as art director on more spiritual cinema projects like Indigo, and Into Me See. When she art directed Indigo, she began working with the likes of director Stephen Simon ( Somewhere in Time, What Dreams May Come), and author Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations with God), she realized she had found the right place to integrate her spiritual aspect with her filmmaking experience to work for a medium she knows and loves.  She completed the feature film version of Conversations with God as the film’s production designer and went on to design the upcoming spiritual adventure feature Dreams Awake, written and directed by Jerry Alden Deal.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Renee had noticed a wild red-tail hawk that spent his winters in the river bottom behind her house, and through a strange encounter, they formed a unique, life-changing friendship.   For the past eleven years, “Tennerin” has migrated away in spring and returned to Renee in the fall, remembering her, coming to her call, and even finding her miles away from home by some mysterious sense, to fly with her on her hikes through the Northwest woods.  Renee’s book in progress, The Hawk Diaries: Notes on a Beautiful Friendship is the record of this amazing relationship and its implications for bird intelligence, interspecies understanding and our own spiritual development.

Her stories and essays have won awards in literary arts competitions including the Kay Snow and the Oregon Writers Colony contests, as well as the In the Beginning Was the Word and the Soul-Making Literary Competition.  Renee had worked for several months as a volunteer in Alaska restoring beaches after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and this experience focused her writing to reference the natural world and our relationship to it in stories, articles and essays.  Her stories, some based on events in To the Dolphin Alone, and others concerning peak emotional and spiritual experiences have been called “inspiring”, “a call to live an authentic life”, and “beautifully written” by several of the judges and sponsors of various literary competitions and audience members who have attended her readings.

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