Steven Riskin

Steven Riskin is a senior program officer in the Grant and Fellowships program and a Middle East specialist with particular expertise on Arab-Israeli affairs. He is also responsible for the Institute’s Solicited Grant Initiative on 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 an international network of foundations and other donor agencies funding in the human rights field.

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