Christina Ahlm Holloway

About Christina

Christina was born in England in 1938. Her family came to live with her American mother’s family in California to escape the blitz when she was two and a half years old. Her maternal grandmother, Lucie, fired Christina’s childhood imagination with colorful stories and a house full of possessions from her young life in Ireland. 

An early reader, Christina developed a curiosity for family history and backstory. Inheriting her grandmother’s treasures, that included personal letters, photos, art and a diary, sowed the seeds for her debut historical novel, Whispers Across A Sea.

She attended UC Berkeley, bicycled through Europe at eighteen and skied on the Cal Ski Team before marrying and moving to Washington DC. There she graduated from George Washington University as a young mother.

For fifty years Christina has been a leader in environmental education and land conservation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her passion for environmental activism began in April 1970, marching on the first Earth Day pushing a newborn in a stroller. Since then, she has made contributions to the field of conservation, founding The Environmental Volunteers, and as Executive Director of the Trust for Hidden Villa. She served on the boards of The Peninsula Open Space Trust, the Yosemite Association and Yosemite Fund for over two decades. In 2010 she played a key role in the complex merger that created The Yosemite Conservancy. In 1979-80 she served as President of the Junior League of Palo Alto. She received the Duveneck Humanitarian Award from the Trust for Hidden Villa in 1996 and the Lifetimes of Achievement Award from Avenidas in 2016.

Christina lives on the Stanford University campus with her professor husband,  who founded the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Stanford Business School. They have three children and seven grandchildren.