Christen Marquez is the program manager for the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Data Policy Lab. She is the conduit between The Lab, the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, and the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community. She ensures timely delivery of project milestones and grant reporting, while also understanding and addressing specific needs of the NHPI community.
Over the last fifteen years, Marquez has maintained intertwining career paths in communications, television production, and nonprofit program management, often on projects related to health, health equity, and human rights. She worked in-depth with the NHPI community in California during her time with the Demographics Research Division of the Asian Americans Advancing Justice on successfully lowering the Census undercount of NHPI and Asian American groups throughout the state. As a producer on the 2020 film Belly of the Beast, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary. Marquez harnessed the power of storytelling and community collaboration that was part of a larger advocacy campaign to secure $4.5 million in compensation for victims of coerced illegal sterilization in the state of California.
She is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and holds a BFA in Film and Television Production.