Christina Bagatavicius Co-Founder & Principal, Bespoke Collective

Cultural strategist, facilitator, and co-founder of Bespoke Collective — working at the intersection of culture, place, and civic life for over 20 years.

Christina Bagatavicius is a cultural strategist, facilitator, and co-founder of Bespoke Collective. For fifteen years she has worked on some of North America's most significant cultural projects — helping institutions, municipalities, and developers unlock the fullest and best cultural potential of a place. In Toronto, she helped launch the Bentway and the Toronto Biennial of Art, and spent nearly a decade leading cultural advisory, engagement, and communications work for Waterfront Toronto across 120 projects. Further afield, her work has taken her from helping establish Fogo Island Inn as a model of community-rooted cultural revitalization, to leading the stakeholder engagement strategy for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's campus masterplan.

She works with organizations that are building something new, questioning what they've become, or ready to change direction — across cultural institutions, civic agencies, and major development projects. Clients include TIFF, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Infrastructure Ontario, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Indigenous Fashion Arts, among many others across North America.

Over the past decade, Christina has facilitated everything from intimate scenario planning sessions with senior leadership to city-wide engagement processes that bring together hundreds of people. She knows what it takes to get a group to that collaborative sweet spot, where many minds raise the potential of what's possible. Her style is hands-on, highly creative, and dialogue-driven. The goal is never just a good outcome. It's a gathering where people leave feeling engaged, uplifted, and that they genuinely contributed to something meaningful.

Before co-founding Bespoke in 2011, Christina was Curator and Head of Interpretation at Tate Britain in London, where she reimagined the visitor experience for one of the world's leading art museums. She returned to Canada as Project Director at Bruce Mau Design, leading strategic foresighting for cultural, civic, and academic institutions across North America and Europe — including the Liverpool Biennial, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Harpo Studios. Her writing has appeared in CBC, Canadian Art, Azure, C Magazine, and Live Magazine. She holds a Master's in History of Art with Distinction from UCL London and an Honours BA in Philosophy from McGill University, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Art Consultants of Canada.