Chris Csikszentmihályi directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and the Computing Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab. He joined the MIT faculty in 2001, and his research has been covered by CNN, BBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, and many others. He co-founded the Center and became its Director in 2009.

Csikszentmihályi also founded the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group, known for developing political technologies that rebalance power between citizens, corporations, and governments. Trained as an artist, he has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media, information activism and the arts for 16 years, lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations on five continents and one subcontinent. He was a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow and a 2007-2008 fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and he recently served on a US State Department tech delegation to explore technological tools to strengthen civil society in the face of narco-trafficking violence in the Mexcio-US border region.