Steven Riskin
Senior Program Officer, Grant and Fellowships
Program
Middle East | Arab-Israeli Relations | Human Rights |
Ethnic Conflict | Conflict Resolution
Phone: (202) 429-3859
E-mail: sriskin@usip.org
Languages: Arabic, Hebrew
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.