The Storytelling Project Cam Christiansen

In the late 1980s, Cam Christiansen was a teenager living in the Edmonton suburbs, when his Danish-born dad decided to take the Christiansen family on a European vacation.

That experience jump-started Christiansen’s understanding of how creative cities—and lives, including his own—could potentially be.

“When you went to Europe, pre-Internet, it was actually a real culture shock,” he says. “I remember literally poking our heads out of the train station in Copenhagen and seeing all these European backpacker kids—and they all had these great scarves and were so exotic–and European!”

The impact upon teenaged Christiansen was total—in all the best ways that a suburban teenager’s life can be transformed.