C Diane Christensen

C. Diane Christensen is the president of The Christensen Fund, a San Francisco–based private foundation that focuses its support on programs at the interface between natural environments and human cultures in five different regions of the world, and where Diane also served as executive director from 1988 until 2002. (CCA has been a grantee of the Fund and CCA's Carmen M. Christensen Production Stage is named in honor of Diane's mother.) Diane did her undergraduate work at Stanford University and her graduate work at Columbia University in African History. She taught African History and served as an assistant academic dean at Tufts University; later she founded and ran for 10 years the Christensen Research Institute, a biological research facility in Papua New Guinea. She currently works at Manzanita Management Corp., a Palo Alto asset management firm and serves on the boards of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Turquoise Mountain Foundation USA, currently serving as board chair, and the US board for Kabul, Afghanistan. Diane also is a member of Stanford University's Humanities and Sciences Council, Arts Initiative (SICA) and Archaeology Council.