Steven Riskin

Steven Riskin is a senior program officer in the Grant and Fellowship program and a Middle East specialist with particular expertise on Arab-Israeli affairs. He is also responsible for the Institute’s Priority Grant Competition related to Iran. He came to the Institute from the Ford Foundation, where he was a New York–based program officer and consultant on Middle East issues. He was responsible for program development and grantmaking in Israel, designing and implementing programs in the areas of human rights, social justice and conflict resolution. With the foundation’s Cairo office staff, he also engaged in program development in the Arab world. He has traveled extensively throughout the region.

Riskin has been a consultant to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights and several foundations seeking to advance social justice and peace in the Middle East. He was a researcher at the Brookings Institution, a foreign affairs analyst at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress and a co-founder of the International Human Rights Funders Group, an international network of over 250 foundations and other donor agencies funding in the human rights field. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Compton Foundation, a California-based philanthropy that focuses its grantmaking on peace and security [2], environment and sustainability [3], and population and reproductive health [4].

He holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in Arab studies from Georgetown University.