Matt Kester is the Creator, Showrunner and Executive Producer of Rescue: HI-Surf for FBC / WBTV / John Wells Productions.  Previously, he was a Co-Executive Producer on Animal Kingdom at TNT, and he wrote on the show for the last four seasons of the series.  Before that, he was an Executive Story Editor on the WGN America show Outsiders and a Staff Writer on the ABC / WBTV show Forever. Matt ran away from home at 16 to pursue a life of surfing in Hawaii, put himself through high school, college and grad school, and spent several years as a professor of history in Hawaii before segueing to TV writing. In 2013, he published a critically acclaimed non-fiction book through Oxford University Press entitled Remembering Iosepa: History, Place, and Religion in the American West.