Christian Hansen grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where he developed an interest in photography and journalism. In his third year of journalism school, he dropped out of college to move to New York City, and began working as a photojournalist for the New York Times. He covered national politics, sports, and local news. His photographs have appeared in New York Magazine, Time Magazine, Der Spiegel, and the Wall Street Journal.
While returning to college to complete his degree, his research into the private prison industry led him to The Octopus, an unfinished book by Danny Casolaro, who died under mysterious circumstances while writing about the ties between a stolen software program, a series of unsolved murders, and some of the biggest political scandals of the 20th century. For the next several years, while working as a local reporter in rural Wyoming, he continued his investigation of the Octopus story independently, until he teamed up with his childhood friend, director Zachary Treitz, to turn a decade’s worth of research into a documentary, which would eventually become American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders.