Weekly Movie Challenge

Christina Wren

Biography

Christina Wren most recently released her comedy series, Hicksters, that follows a spunky Hijabi and her metro Black husband who inherit a farm in Trump country and begin their wildest adventure as the new neighbors no one could have expected.Hicksters was a Sundance Lab Finalist and was inspired by Christina’s life as the daughter of a dad from the Middle East and a mom from Iowa who then herself grew up in urban America.

She is co-founder of the production company Two Kids with a Camera and has producedbranded content for clients including Travel Channel, HGTV, PBS and Discovery Digital. She produced 80 live action segments of the Emmy Award winning children's show, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, as well as produced the feature films Moon and Sun and Rehabilitation of the Hill. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch Drama School and while at NYU she studied playwriting and was part of NYU’s first Hip Hop Theater course and devised production, Re/Rites. It was here she cut her teeth as a writer/content creator and shortly after graduation pursued a grant to lead a series of workshops that culminated in a multi-media production rooted in music and spoken word poetry, exploring the oral histories of her native Northside of Pittsburgh in conversation with the voices of the young people learning to survive in what the community had since become. She then produced the documentary, Streetball, following South Africa’s 2008/2009 Homeless World Cup teams and shortly after wrote her first feature film, Saudade?, following a teenager who hops a bus to New York City in search of her runaway brother by following his work as a street artist. Saudade? quietly explores how young people become homeless as you slowly learn your main characters are all on the verge of or now fully living on the street.

Christina grew up straddling communities culturally, economically and regionally. Reflecting the nuances of the worlds and characters she knows and loves are at the forefront of her body of work, as her life experiences are often in direct opposition to what is commonly portrayed in mass media.