Christina Callahan is a lampworker from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She has been lampworking for twenty-six years. She first fell in love with hot glass when visiting Italy at fifteen. Her hot glass craft began as a hobby, taking week-long courses during the summer while attending University. She started making beads and made them for a long time.

She only considered herself an artist after taking a murrine class with Loren Stump, whose course changed her entire outlook on glass. The enormous possibilities of what could be made from glass exhilarated her. She became obsessed with murrine and made hundreds of canes to develop this skill. She was also introduced to the paperweight during this course, making tiny flowers that she found annoying and tedious. She vowed never to make another paperweight again!

As her interest in murrine grew, she started studying how murine was used in the past and how it is being used by various artists today. Studying murrine led her back to studying paperweights, and her vow was instantly broken when she figured out how much more murrine she could fit into a paperweight. She loved the freedom of expression that the paperweight offered.

In the last few years, Christina found her artistic style, combining the Franchini Italian murrine and contemporary lampworking techniques. Glass is constantly evolving media, and she continues to evolve with it. Christina’s work has been published in “The Flow Magazine” numerous times since 2014, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass. She also recently received the Sunny Lu Peer Scholarship from PCA Texas and attended a course taught by Daisuke Takeuchi, a well-known Tonbodama artist.