Central, Southern and West Texas feel like home to me but prior to living in Cambridge I spent my time in NYC working as a socially engaged artist and teacher of digital media arts.   I have worked as a producer for the public art nonprofit Creative Time and the land advocacy organization 596 Acres. Additionally as a film maker I have worked in partnership with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a nonprofit that partners activists with artists to design participatory products to promote civic engagement. As a leader on the Urban Investigation team I worked with youth in the Bronx to make a short film about how the cost of public transportation is decided in NYC.

At the Grand Central Neighborhood Drop-In Shelter for the Homeless I worked for a year as the first Director of Community and Arts Programing and at Harvard I currently work as the Digital Communications Assistant for the Making Caring Common Youth Advisory Board as well as a Senior Digital Editor for the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy. Last fall in collaboration with the African American Student Union at the Harvard Graduate School of Design I designed and implement a civic leadership mapping project with youth from underserved Boston communities.  The project provided tools for youth to map local racial inequity and helped them to horizontally organize with other youth to raise awareness of the issues at stake and seek solutions from local policy makers.

Prior to living in NYC as the recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Idea Fund Grant I worked for a year on a film and performance protest series called Migration Patterns During Wartime along the Us/ Mexico Border. The project protested changing immigration policy and practices in Texas and Alabama. Older projects on trauma, parafictions, and identity swapping can be found on my site https://christina-sukhgian-houle.squarespace.com/.

My current research investigates how civic leadership is changing in the digital age and inquires how activist pedagogy can be taught to youth in this shifting media landscape.