Anna-Lisa Christiane – Earth Angel

Former Miss Earth turned influencer Anna-Lisa Christiane is a Kiwi cutie for our time

- By Jordan Riefe

It’s no surprise that a woman like Anna-Lisa Christiane would one day find herself strutting runways in New York and Paris, but addressing the U.N.? At the age of 19? Didn’t seem like it was in the cards. And yet there she was in Austria discussing climate change with an august body of world diplomats.

“If I could speak at the U.N. at 19, if I could travel to Austria or Thailand alone at this age and have such a great time, what else can I do?” she asks, reflecting on a transformative experience that came as a result of her winning the title of Miss Earth 2015, a beauty pageant that advocates for environmental awareness, conservation and social responsibility. “After the pageant I felt like I was really confident and could speak in public. It shaped me to feel like a confident woman. It gave me that outlook that I could take on the world.”

She never thought it could happen to her, a local girl from Wellington, New Zealand, who grew up chilling on the black beaches of New Plymouth in the western region of Taranaki, and worked as a shopgirl in a Wellington mall. With looks to die for and standing 5’11”, she heard it often: “you should become a model.” But few women, no matter how beautiful, think they have a shot at a dream like that. It was when she heard it from a scout from Red 11 Model Management that she started to take it seriously.