Laleh Ispahani

Laleh Ispahani (@lispahani) is Co-Director of Open Society-U.S., helping to oversee the grant making, advocacy, and administrative work in the three Open Society-U.S. offices in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. She previously was Managing Director of Open Society-U.S., and earlier the program’s Acting Director; Acting Deputy; and Director of its Democracy Division. Before OSF, she worked at the ACLU, as Senior Policy Counsel in the International Human Rights & Racial Justice Programs.

She was raised in Dacca, Karachi and Tehran, and now lives in New York City. She is married to Tapio Vaskio, a Finnish-born adviser in the intelligence and security sector, and they are raising a 15-year-old. Ispahani was educated at Harvard College and the Georgetown University Law Center.