By Neal Wong

“Being in the ocean is like breathing,” Sachi Cunningham said. “If I’m not in the ocean for a period of time, I feel like I’m not me. It basically allows me to be who I am, which is an ocean lover.”

Cunningham, 53, has spent more than two decades swimming into some of the most powerful waves on the California coast with a camera in her hands, creating documentary films and photographs.

She sat for an interview with her hair still wet from a cold plunge, and traced her lifelong love for the ocean from summers spent on Southern California beaches as a kid.

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cunningham spent every summer of her childhood in California, where both of her parents were from. She attended Japanese school at a Gardena Buddhist church and split the season between her mother’s Japanese American family in Torrance and her father’s family near Capistrano Beach. Other than her mother, she knew no Japanese people growing up. Those weeks on the sand became the part of the year she most looked forward to, and the return home was hard.

“I always wondered, ‘why are we going back to Pittsburgh?’” she said. “I wanted to stay in California. That’s why I call California home, because it’s where I feel the most at home since I was a kid.”

Part of what drew her, she said, was the way the water made her feel small.

“I love the awe that you get when you’re in the ocean,” she said. “The ocean reminds you that there’s a world that’s much larger than you, that pretty much we’re insignificant. And that’s actually comforting to me.”

She had watched surfers during those summers and collected surf magazines back in Pittsburgh, but no one had ever taught her to ride a board. The chance finally came in 1994, when she took a semester off during her senior year at Brown University and came to San Francisco. She lived on Diamond Street in Noe Valley, worked at Spinelli’s coffee to pay rent, interned at KTEH (a TV station) in San Jose, and stopped in Santa Cruz to surf on drives home.

“I always wanted to try surfing, but I never knew anyone who could teach me how to do it,” Cunningham said. “It wasn’t until I was an adult that I had a friend from college that helped teach me how to stand up.”

Surfing became a lifelong pursuit, one she still works at. She recently took a lesson from Bianca Valenti, a big wave surfer who once lived in the neighborhood.

“It’s kind of like golf,” she said. “It’s one of those lifelong sports that you are always getting better at, and always learning new things. I like the challenge of it physically, mentally, and it also allows me to be in this place that I love.”

Surfing was a long way off, though, from where her career began. After graduating, Cunningham worked in Los Angeles in scripted and commercial film, including a stint as office manager for actress Demi Moore. Her path turned toward documentary work on the film “Bandits,” where she was an assistant to director Barry Levinson. Levinson received a camera from actor Bruce Willis and handed it to Cunningham to shoot behind-the-scenes photos. Willis saw how excited she was and gave her a video camera.

“I was more interested in what I was filming behind the camera than the scripted feature that I was working on,” Cunningham said. “That’s what excited me, telling these stories behind the scenes and finding stories from real people.”

That discovery led her to the Bay Area. In the early 2000s, Cunningham moved to the Outer Sunset, following a boyfriend who surfed Mavericks, and applied to UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. One of her proudest projects to this day is her thesis film, which followed surfers in Puerto Rico who stopped the Army Corps of Engineers from illegally dredging a beloved surf break.

After Berkeley, Cunningham produced for Frontline World, took freelance jobs, then worked at the Los Angeles Times from 2008 to 2011. She and her husband Zachary, whom she met in graduate school, then drove from Los Angeles to Chile over 14 months. Along the way, she kept bumping into faces from home as Sunset surfers fled the neighborhood’s gray summers for sunnier spots. What she missed during those months told her where she belonged.

“I missed the ocean,” Cunningham said. “There’s a lot more power than a lot of beaches and surf spots, so I missed the power of these waves in this stretch of coast, and I missed the surf community here, which is unique.”

While traveling, she learned she had landed a tenure-track job teaching multimedia journalism at San Francisco State University, and she returned to the Sunset in summer 2012, four months pregnant. Her daughter, Nami, was born that year. In 2013, she began swimming out at Mavericks to photograph surfers.

Her days now begin with lemon water and coffee, a walk with her dog Kiko on the beach and a cold plunge with a group of neighborhood women – if not a surf. The neighborhood’s mix of Irish and Chinese American families, artists, academics and surfers is what she treasures most.

“I like the combination of people and activities,” she said. “I like that it’s a very Asian neighborhood. That’s very different from what I grew up with, and it’s something that I’m really happy my daughter’s growing up with.”

Cunningham’s one worry is what the City’s tech boom and rising housing costs could do to the place she fell for in the mid-1990s, when she could pay rent working at a coffee shop.

“I just hope that part of San Francisco stays intact,” she said. “I hope that artists can still come here, and I hope that the economy allows for a diversity of people to live here and thrive here, because that’s the part of San Francisco that I love as much as the ocean.”

For the next few months, Cunningham will be on a boat to support endurance swimmer Catherine Breed’s attempt at swimming the length of the California coast. Visit seasachi.com for more information.