Christina Fialho

Christina Fialho is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics, including social entrepreneurship, women in leadership, law, immigration, and LGBTQ+ inclusion in the media. She is herself an award-winning social entrepreneur and attorney with over 15 years experience creating and scaling nonprofits and social enterprises.

She has trained the next generation of social entrepreneurs at UCSD Rady School of Management as their first Social Entrepreneur in Residence and at USC Marshall School of Business as the Managing Director of their center on social enterprise. She is currently a coach and social impact consultant.

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 helped draft and pass 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. Prior to starting Freedom for Immigrants, Fialho assisted in defending immigrants from detention and deportation with a focus on representing LGBTQ asylum seekers.

She is a recipient of the 2020 John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, the 2019 Social Venture Partners Accelerator Fellowship, the 2018 James Irvine Leadership Award, the 2016 Ashoka Fellowship, the 2013 Rockwood Leadership Institute Fellowship, and the 2012 Echoing Green Fellowship.

Fialho regularly appears across major news outlets, including on MSNBC's The Beat with Ari Melber and Hardball with Chris Matthews. Her essays on immigration detention have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, InStyle Magazine, Forbes, Salon, The Huffington Post, USA Today, and The Hill among other outlets. Her multi-media work has been supported by Cal Humanities, screened in the Ambulante Film Festival, and featured on NPR and Upworthy. In 2017, she co-hosted a concert with Grammy-winning artist Miguel outside the largest immigrant prison, leading to the production of his music video “Now” about detention. Fialho also served as a script consultant for Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black.

She is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Detention Coalition, and she is admitted to practice law in the State of California.