Christian Picciolini

Christian Picciolini is an Emmy Award-winning director and producer, author, public speaker, peace advocate, and reformed extremist. His work and life purpose bear witness to a deep-seated desire to atone for his grisly past, and an urgency to transform the hurts and wounds he inflicted into vehicles for profound healing. He tenaciously works to use the redemption he has been offered to make the world a better, more peace-filled place.After leaving the violent hate movement he helped create during his youth, he began the painstaking process of rebuilding his life. Christian earned a degree with honors in international relations and international business from DePaul University, began his own global media and counter-extremism consulting firm, and was appointed a member of both the Chicago Grammy Rock Music Committee and the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival.In 2010 and 2011, he was nominated for three regional Emmy Awards for his role as executive producer of JBTV, one of America's longest-running nationally broadcast music television programs. In 2016, he won an Emmy Award for his role in directing and producing an anti-hate advertising campaign called "There is life after hate", aimed at helping youth disengage from white-supremacist groups. He has worked as an adjunct professor at the college level, and contributed to Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt's, and Director of Jigsaw, Jared Cohen's, New York Times bestseller, The New Digital Age.In 2009, he cofounded Life After Hate, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping communities and organizations implement long-term solutions that counter all types of racism and violent extremism. currently working to build the world's first global network of extremism preventionists, who are helping people disengage from hate movements and other violent ideologies around the globe.His involvement in, and eventual exit from the early American neo-Nazi skinhead movement is chronicled in Christian's memoir 'White American Youth: My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement-and How I Got Out' (Hachette, 2018). Christian's book has been used in courses at Yale University, Texas Women's University, and the New York Institute of Technology, among others.An explorer by nature, Christian loves to learn new things and thrives on challenging himself with "positive disruptive thinking." He values kindness, selflessness, sincerity, and respect for all people. Christian believes that small ideas can change the world, and wherever we are we should all "make good happen." Show less «