Christine Howard

Background

About Christine Howard

Don't let my resume fool you. I may look like a bureaucrat—but I am a researcher by nature. I'm driven by a curiosity about and a love for people. Fascination with human interaction has fueled my lifelong interest in genealogy and local history, research practices that foster both discipline and creativity. My passion for the arts led to a baccalaureate degree in Art History at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where my education included the opportunity to travel to France and Spain to study churches along the Camino de Santiago and to pursue independent research on the iconography of a 14th-century Book of Hours. I draw on these foundational research experiences on a daily basis, sometimes in surprising ways. Not only have they informed my subsequent independent research and my years of service on Seattle's Landmarks Preservation Board, they have also been the springboard for a career managing academic programs. As it turns out, robust policy development, budget analysis, human resources management, and strategic planning all depend on gathering, analyzing, and evaluating data—much of it related to the interaction of people.