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Christina Olson Spiesel, 82, of New Haven, CT, has died. She was the wife of Dr. Sydney Spiesel of 61 years. born in California and lived in New Haven for 60 years. She was a graduate of Shimer College, a school rigorously grounded in the broad liberal arts. She continued her wide education at the University of Chicago for a graduate degree from its Committee on General Studies in the Humanities. That education perfectly prepared her for the many and disparate fields in which she worked and excelled. She primarily identified herself as a visual artist, mostly as an oil painter, though she worked in a variety of media. Her work lives in private collections and her commissioned paintings hang in several of Yale’s colleges. In addition to her role in the arts, she was a teacher of writing in Bard’s Language and Thinking program, helped to develop early computer software devoted to natural language processing, and had a civic life as Chair of New Haven’s Cultural Affairs Commission. For more than 20 years, though not a lawyer, she taught about visual persuasion in three different law schools and held an appointment as a Senior Research Scholar in Yale’s School of Law. Her legal scholarship resulted in the publication of many academic papers in law and co-authorship of the seminal book on visual persuasion. She was politically aware and astute with a slightly unseemly taste for political scandals. Christina was devoted to students and teaching; supporting and enriching the careers of the undergraduates, law students, and young legal scholars she met with; particularly advancing the careers of academic women, and men as well. In addition to her husband, she is survived by her two children, Elie Spiesel and his wife Joann Gaughran of South Orange, NJ, and Sirri Spiesel and her husband Daniel Kiecza) of Arlington, MA; and her grandchildren, Kelyn and Eike Kiecza and Aoife and Berit Spiesel. She was a woman who saw beauty in everything, and her loss is devastating to all who knew her.