Christian Clark

Schell Center Visiting Human Rights Fellow
Christian Clark cartoon

Christian Clark is a cartoonist (Washington Post, Financial Times, Toronto Star, Guardian, etc.) and two-time Emmy Award-winning writer (Sesame Street) who has written and/or illustrated three graphic histories including the 2017 UNtold: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War. Christian has extensive international advocacy and human rights experience working for the BBC and the United Nations in North America, Asia, Africa and the Balkans. He led the Meena project for some years, a groundbreaking UNICEF effort to advance girls’ rights using animation for social change in Asia.

He is the founder of the Graphix Project (GP) which will serve as a cartoon-based human rights support initiative. The GP will allow human rights and social activists, high school students and others — from #BLM in the U.S. to the climate justice campaign globally — to connect with, plan and learn from each other and experts through the project’s interactive online platform. The project will promote active change by using a range of mediums and products including activist toolkits, grade appropriate curriculum, graphic histories and novels, comics, animation and podcasts.

The project concept has been tested through Masters level course work at both CUNY (2019) and Columbia University (2020), as well as through a multilingual (English, French and Spanish) online survey, developed with Amnesty International, shared with 200 human rights entities worldwide. The results will be fed into a Yale-supported global focus group initiative to answer a central question: “Are cartoons/graphics seen as a serious and appropriate medium for engaging activists across cultures?”