Bio
Christina DeFranco is an Emmy award winning journalist with over 17 years experience in broadcast news. She got her start in 1990 at a small cable station on Cape Cod and then went on to work in television markets from upstate New York to New Haven, Connecticut, covering everything from the prospect of the Patriots moving to Hartford to the existence of a brain cancer cluster at Pratt and Whitney (a national story she broke in 2001). She has won a New York Festival Award, two Emmys, Associated Press Honors, and multiple citations from Connecticut’s Society for Professional Journalists for her reporting. She has spent the last three years researching and producing her first independent documentary “Darkest Hours: The Crisis in Children’s Mental Health Care.†This documentary is an in-depth look at society’s most vulnerable medical patients: children with mental illness. It sheds light on how kids have been forced to cope with a fragmented system that hurts them and the families who love them. The stories she’s gotten the most satisfaction from are the ones that reveal a breakdown in the system: “I believe that this is how journalism best serves the public because once that breakdown is identified, there’s a demand to fix it, and the human condition improves.†Christina is a graduate of Duke University. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two sons.