Kristina Applegate | Founder & Program Director
Kristina Applegate is the founder and program director of StoryBridge Nepal, where her work centers on ethical storytelling, place-based learning, and cross-cultural collaboration.
StoryBridge is built on a simple belief: we are all teachers and students. It creates field-learning environments where participants and communities learn with—and from—one another through storytelling, cultural exchange, reflection, and shared experience.
Art and storytelling gave me a way to find my voice. StoryBridge was created to help others discover theirs.
Kristina Applegate: A Life Shaped by Creativity, Culture and Field Learning
StoryBridge Nepal grew from experiences spanning childhood, family, art, storytelling, education, international storytelling, and years of collaborative work with young people and communities.
A Global Perspective
Kristina’s global perspective began while living in Tehran, Iran, as a child in the late 1970s. Growing up in a cross-cultural environment shaped a lifelong curiosity about how people live, learn, and tell stories across cultures.
Learning Differently
A lifelong artist and late-blooming writer, Kristina is also dyslexic. Learning differently helped her recognize strengths that often go unseen—visual thinking, empathy, pattern recognition, and big-picture synthesis.
StoryBridge supports many kinds of learners and multiple pathways into confidence, voice, and authorship.
Storytelling Across Cultures
Through Kids Share Workshops, founded in 2008, Kristina has worked with young people and communities around the world to document stories through film, photography, art, and collaborative media projects.
Early Field-Learning Work
Projects in Nicaragua and other communities helped shape the philosophy behind StoryBridge: learning through collaboration, creativity, local relationships, and shared experience rather than observation from a distance.
Turning Personal Experience into a Shared Learning Model
Kristina’s approach comes from a life rooted in family, creativity, and hands-on learning. While raising her young children on a small farm, she cared for and rescued animals including llamas, goats, peacocks, and horses. During those early years, the idea for Kids Share Workshops began to take shape.
As a young student, Kristina often struggled to express her thoughts clearly and sometimes felt “in the dark” while others seemed to excel verbally. Art became the turning point. Drawing and visual storytelling gradually opened the door to writing, teaching, and building programs that help others discover their own voices.
StoryBridge Nepal brings those experiences together through field-based learning rooted in place, cultural humility, local partnership, reflection, creativity, and meaningful human connection.
What Shapes the Work
Learning becomes more meaningful when knowledge and experience move in both directions.
Strong programs begin with listening, trust, local guidance, and sustained collaboration.
Art, storytelling, photography, film, conversation, and reflection offer different ways to participate and communicate.
StoryBridge moves beyond conventional tourism through time in place, thoughtful participation, and cultural exchange.
Connect with StoryBridge Nepal
Learn more about the people, places, partnerships, and field-learning experiences shaping StoryBridge Nepal—or explore the first small-group Cultural Learning Journey.
info@kidsshareworkshops.com