Renée Montagne is host of NPR's Morning Edition. Since 2004, she has been broadcasting from NPR West in Culver City, California, with cohost Steve Inskeep in Washington. Montagne is a familiar voice on NPR. She hosted All Things Considered with Robert Siegel for two years. She has worked for NPR's Science, National and Foreign desks.

Over the years, Montagne has done thousands of interviews on a wide range of topics: Kurt Vonnegut on how he transformed surviving the WWII firebombing of Dresden into the novel Slaughterhouse Five; National Guardsmen on how they handle the holidays in Iraq; Paul McCartney on singing the old songs; a Hollywood historian on how the famous hillside sign came to be; Toni Morrison on the dreams and memories she turned into novels; and Bud Montagne, Renée's father, remembering the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Since September 11, Montagne traveled throughout Afghanistan, interviewing farmers and mullahs, women and poll workers, the President and an infamous warlord. She has produced three series: 2002's "Recreating Afghanistan"; "Afghanistan Votes" in 2004; and 2006's "the War: Five Years On."

She has received the duPont Columbia Award and has been honored by the Foreign Press Club for her coverage of Afghanistan, and by the National Association of Black Journalists for a series on Black musicians going to war.

Montagne, the daughter of a Marine Corps family, was born in California and raised in locales as diverse as Hawaii and Arizona. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

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Renée Montagne is host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard broadcast news program in the United States. She will be the 2008 Commencement Speaker for the Arts and Humanities ceremony at UC Santa Barbara on Sunday, June 15th. (Photo: ©2007 NPR, by Stephen Voss)

The commencement ceremony for the arts and humanities is traditionally held near the lagoon overlooking the Pacific on a June Sunday at 1:00 pm. The Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts officiates at the event.

Each graduating class typically includes over 900 students, who earn degrees in Art, Classics, Comparative Literature, Dance, Asian Studies, Chinese, Japanese, English, Film and Media Studies, French, Italian, German, Russian, Slavic Languages and Literature, Spanish, Portuguese, History, Art History, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Theater among other areas.