Christina Fialho is a social entrepreneur, immigration detention
expert, and attorney with over 15 years experience creating and
scaling nonprofits and social change programming. Christina is one of
the top immigration keynote speakers in the United States, and her
essays on immigration detention have been widely published, appearing
in outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, InStyle Magazine, The
Huffington Post, and Refugee Survey Quarterly. She also served as a
script consultant for the final season of Netflix’s Orange Is The New
Black, set in immigration detention.
She is currently the Managing Director of the Brittingham Social
Enterprise Lab at the University of Southern California's Marshall
School of Business where she is educating the next generation of
social entrepreneurs from across the globe. Previously, she served for
over a decade as the co-founder/executive director of Freedom for
Immigrants, a national nonprofit working to abolish the U.S.
immigration detention system. There, she drafted and passed several
groundbreaking laws such as the first statewide legislation in the
United States to stop the expansion of immigration detention, the
Dignity Not Detention Act. For her visionary work, she has been
awarded the 2020 John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, the 2016 Ashoka
Fellowship, and the 2012 Echoing Green Fellowship, among other awards.
She comes from three generations of immigrants and is a proud bisexual woman.