| Digital communications |
Christina started work in the hospitality industry, accumulating 10 years of experience before moving into Digital Communications. In 2016 as part of her role as Cafe Manager, Christina maintained the Instagram account for independent eatery Fieldwork. Realising her creative skill for digital marketing, alongside an ability to effectively pair image and text, she completed an NCFE Level 2 Certificate in Digital Promotion for Business in 2018. Since then she has gone on to accumulate a variety of Freelance industry experience in Digital Communications, including positions at The Royal Society of Edinburgh, The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival, Edinburgh Tradfest, Soundhouse Organisation, Knockengorroch, Assembly Festival, MAKE Learn, Culture Creative, and AGITATE.
In 2024 both The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival and Edinburgh Tradfest (for which Christina managed digital marketing campaigns) reported landmark sales, attracting their highest audience figures to date. Video editing, website maintenance and audio transcription also form an important part of Christina's digital toolkit alongside more traditional marketing skills.
| Recent digital initiatives |
HippCast
As part of her role as Digital Content Manager at The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival, in 2023 Christina created HippCast: a Festival podcast specialising in the HippFest's key areas of delivery: silent film with music. Designed as another way to connect contemporary audiences with archive film, HippCast creates space for silent film fans to explore new themes, connect with the staff and community behind delivering the Festival, and learn more about the programme and other relevant topics in an informal way.
Christina is responsible for planning, interviewing, editing, formatting and transcribing each episode. A full English transcript is published alongside the show, so that Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences still have access to the content of each conversation.
| Previous digital initiatives |
Post-Covid-19 Futures Commission
The RSE’s Post-Covid-19 Futures Commission aims to support a better future for Scotland and to build a fairer and more resilient society, through addressing both immediate challenges and longer-term policy and practice questions.
Working as Communications Officer, Christina played a fundamental role in shaping the Commission's digital outputs and ensuring that findings were communicated effectively, creatively and accessibly across all of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's platforms. This also involved maintaining the Commission site.
Wendy McMurdo in Conversation
Christina took the opportunity to interview Wendy McMurdo and discuss Night Garden, a body of work made during the coronavirus lockdown and exhibited in 2020 as part of the group show Florilegium at Inverleith House. The conversation covers the future of exhibitions, the sensory acuteness of nature, the stillness of prints, flowers, digital culture, and art's potential for healing. This was kindly filmed in the Gallery by Kat Gollock.
This interview was inspired by the launch of the Studies Editions initiative (in which both Wendy and Christina have prints available for purchase) and premiered on the Studies in Photography Facebook page. You can also watch this on YouTube here.
Finding Focus
Christina recorded a series of informal interviews with photographers that she admired in January/February 2020. She has recently released these conversations as a resource designed to 'demystify the creative industries'. These exchanges not only offer a behind-the-scenes discussion of contemporary project work, but go one step further to discuss the challenges and compromises facing emerging artists today.
You can watch a video accompaniment to these conversations, complete with subtitles, portraits of the sitters and relevant project content here.
Finding Focus is also available as a podcast on all major platforms.
Stills School Online
Christina began teaching a broad introduction to photography in October 2019 as part of the Stills School: from analogue developing and printing techniques, to zine-making and collage.
In light of the COVID-19 lockdown Christina was invited by Stills to produce a pair of educational video resources encouraging those interested in exploring photography to participate in a series of small exercises at home.
You can find these videos on the Stills School Vimeo channel here.
#NightWalkZine
The '#nightwalkzine' project was in collaboration with photographer Jack Low, bridging Edinburgh and Glasgow during the COVID-19 lockdown. This project provided a therapeutic pursuit for the photographers, whilst seeking to tangibly connect with others in a responsible way.
Participants were invited to 'build their own walk' and curate their own publication by sharing their desired sequence to their Instagram stories. These were then printed and folded into zines using available materials. This cleverly incorporated raising awareness of the project with participation, producing a unique digital and physical 'walk' for each order.
'Work hard and make things happen.'