Dr. Nina Ansary is an award-winning Iranian-American author, historian and women’s rights advocate. She is a UN Women Global Champion for Innovation, director of the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum Women’s Leadership Initiative at the University of Cambridge, and former director of the World Affairs Councils of America Global Women’s Lecture Series.

Her best-selling books Jewels of Allah: The Untold Story of Women in Iran and Anonymous Is a Woman: A Global Chronicle of Gender Inequality garnered numerous awards – including the International Book Award in “Women’s Issues” and the Benjamin Franklin Book Award in “History” and “Interior Design.”

Nina is the recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Alumni Award, and the Barnard College, Columbia University Trailblazer Award.

She has appeared on CNN International, Fox News, Larry King, the Today Show, the BBC, Sky News and been featured in a variety of publications, including Newsweek, Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper, The Los Angeles Times, The UK Daily Telegraph, Teen Vogue and the Yale Journal of International Affairs. She has written for Time, HuffPost and The Daily Beast and presented her work at multilateral conferences, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, the United States Senate Human Rights Caucus, Girl Up Leadership Summit, the London School of Economics, and at Columbia, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities.

Nina was born in Tehran and moved with her family to the United States after the 1979 Revolution in Iran. She grew up in New York City and received her Master of Arts in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and PhD in History from Columbia University. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Iranian American Women Foundation and the Board of Advisors of the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum at the University of Cambridge.

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