Where She Lives
Roanoke, Texas — the small North Texas town just north of Fort Worth that has quietly become one of the most interesting addresses in the Metroplex. A former cattle stop on the Chisholm Trail, it is now known as the "Unique Dining Capital of Texas," with a walkable Oak Street lined with independent restaurants, and sits adjacent to the vast Alliance Texas development that anchors her professional life.
Work & Vocation
Marketing at Hillwood Properties, the Perot family's real estate and development firm, whose portfolio includes AllianceTexas — one of the largest master-planned developments in the country. She brings to the role the storytelling training of Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, one of the country's premier programs in communications and media.
How She Got Here
Before Hillwood, Anna Christine spent nearly four years with Dr. Phil McGraw — first in Los Angeles as a production assistant and then associate producer on the long-running nationally syndicated Dr. Phil Show, and then following the franchise to Dallas when Dr. Phil launched Merit Street Media, where she produced Dr. Phil Primetime and worked as a news producer on The News on Merit. Producing that kind of television is fast, demanding work — booking guests, shaping segments, managing sensitive stories under a daily deadline — and she built a reputation for handling it with poise. It is the foundation the Hillwood role is built on.
Recent Travels
The Los Angeles years gave her the West Coast, and the move to Texas has opened up the Southwest in a new way. Trips back to Western New York to see family, the occasional return to Playa del Carmen, and the slow accumulation of places seen with Jackson make up the current map.
People & Community
Her partner is Jackson Oberg. Together they have built a life in the Metroplex that centers on the people closest to them — a small circle of family, friends, and colleagues who have followed her from Syracuse to Los Angeles to North Texas, and the new community she and Jackson are building in Roanoke.
What's Ahead
A career in marketing at Hillwood has a long runway, and North Texas is growing faster than almost anywhere else in the country. Beyond the work, the next chapter is the one she and Jackson are writing together — which, as these things go, is best left to them to tell.
"You spend the early years teaching them to pay attention. Then one morning you realize they are paying closer attention than you are."
The photograph of the beach walk has stayed with me in a way I did not anticipate at the time it was taken. She was seven. I was holding her hand, the way you do, not really thinking about it. You assume there will be many more such mornings, and there are — until there aren't, and the child beside you is suddenly an adult living several states away, with her own work, her own home, her own life.
What I did not see coming — what no parent quite sees coming — is the particular kind of person she would become. Anna Christine has a quality that is rare and, by every account I hear from the people around her, immediately recognizable. She listens. Not the polite, waiting-her-turn kind of listening, but the kind that makes the other person feel, sometimes for the first time that day, that what they are saying is worth hearing. Her colleagues at Hillwood have a word for it. They call her a Unicorn. I understand why.
The small girl on the beach is still in there, somewhere — in the way she pays attention, in the easy laugh, in the willingness to take the long way home. But she has built something on top of that foundation that is entirely her own, and her mother and I get to watch it unfold from a respectful distance, occasionally being let in.
It is, I have come to think, the best thing a parent can hope for: that the child you raised becomes someone you would have wanted to know, regardless.
