Who is CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI?
Christian Picciolini is an award-winning television producer, a public speaker, author, peace advocate, and a reformed violent extremist. His life’s work bears witness to an ongoing and profound need to atone for a grisly past, and an urgency to make something of his time on this planet by contributing to the greater good.
After leaving the violent hate movement he helped create during his youth, he began the painstaking process of rebuilding his life. While working for IBM, Christian earned a degree in international relations from DePaul University, and later began his own global media firm.
In 2018, Christian founded Free Radicals Project, a nonprofit dedicated to helping others counter racism and violent extremism. He is currently building the world’s first global network of extremism preventionists, who are helping people disengage from hate movements and other violent ideologies around the globe.
In 2016, Christian won an Emmy Award for his role in directing and producing an anti-hate advertising campaign aimed at helping youth disengage from white-supremacist groups. He has worked as an adjunct professor at the college level, and is a frequent commentator on national and international news networks.
Christian Picciolini's memoir, 'WHITE AMERICAN YOUTH: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—and How I Got Out,' where he details his involvement in, and eventual exit from, the early American white-supremacist skinhead movement, was published by Hachette Books in 2018. His second book, 'BREAKING HATE: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism' is due out on February 11, 2020.
In 2018, he launch a documentary series with MSNBC called 'Breaking Hate,' which documents his work helping counter extremism.
Video produced and directed by Kobi Swissa, Swissa Creative, 2017.