BRIEF BIO

Christina Raia is a New York born and based Writer/Director of Indo-Trinidadian descent, and the Founder of CongestedCat Productions. With an affinity for building tension and blending tones, she focuses on character-driven and socially conscious horror and comedy, using genre as a lens to represent, discuss, and dissect social issues, otherness, and real world anxieties. Her work has screened at film festivals all across the country, most recently at Sidewalk Film Festival and Chattanooga Film Festival, and has been covered on various press outlets, such as Indiewire and BuzzFeed. Christina was a selected fellow for New York Film Festival’s Artist Academy and for the film incubator Breaking Light Studio. Through the latter, Christina met Lilly Wachowski & her Anarchist United team, who are producing Christina’s feature, which she wrote and will direct, a horror-comedy previously titled Silent Night, slated for production in fall 2026.

IN MY OWN WORDS

Growing up, I was raised in a two parent household, my wonderful single mom and the TV. I didn't know exactly how movies and shows were made, but for as long as I can remember, I knew I wanted to make them. Nurtured early on by a buffet of The Twilight Zone reruns, Buffy the Vampire Slayer boxsets, quippy 90s slashers, and campy dark satires with feminist underpinnings à la Drop Dead Gorgeous, my creepy meets quirky, subtext-fueled sensibilities were formed. I started writing stories at age five and wrote my first screenplay, or at least what I thought was a screenplay, at age nine. I felt the magic of bringing my ideas to life outside my head when I was 13 and got to play with a camcorder for the first time. From that point forward, my life’s passion was clear. The first in my family to go to college, I got a BA in Film Studies in 2012 and began my independent filmmaking journey by writing, directing, and producing a feature as my senior thesis, a horror film I crowdfunded that same year, while simultaneously directing and co-creating the web series Kelsey, which went on to be an IndieWire Critic’s Pick for one of the Best Comedy Web Series of 2013. Though both are flawed products of learning and growing, that dual experience paved my path as a filmmaker. It gave me a crash course in directing under extreme conditions with nothing but a crafty brain and scrappy, passionate collaborators as resources, and led to not only a growing audience that has followed me from project to project, through nearly a dozen shorts and another crowdfunded feature that I directed (though didn’t write), but also speaking and consulting opportunities where I’ve supported other filmmakers via audience building, crowdfunding, and self-distribution guidance.