Biographical Note

New Permanent Representative of United States Presents Credentials

 

(Based on information provided by the Protocol and Liaison Service)

Samantha Power, the new Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations, presented her credentials to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today.

Ms. Power’s most recent posting was as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights within the Executive Office of the President of the United States, a position she held from January 2009 until February 2013.

She was a member of the Presidential Transition Team of the State Department and of the United States-United Nations Agency Review Teams from November 2008 to January 2009.  She was a part-time adviser on the foreign policy team of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign during 2007 and 2008, having served as an adviser to Mr. Obama from October 2005 to July 2006, when he was a state Senator.

Prior to her Government service, Ms. Power held several positions in academia and journalism.  She was Founding Executive Director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s John F.  Kennedy School of Government from 1998 to 2002.  She was a lecturer in public policy, and Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy from 2002 to January 2009.

As a writer and contributor to Time magazine, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications, Ms. Power reported from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, from 1995 to 2008.  She was also the Special Balkans Correspondent for U.S. News and World Report and contributed regularly to The Washington Post, The Economist and other newspapers from 1993 and 1995.

Her experience with non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations included time as a consultant and analyst for the International Crisis Group in the United Kingdom and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1996 and 1997, and as monitor for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) during the September 1996 presidential election in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  She was a Special Assistant to the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1992 to 1993.

Ms. Power previously served as a board member of the Genocide Intervention Network (later renamed United to End Genocide), International Rescue Committee, International Centre for Transitional Justice, United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the International Crisis Group.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 1992 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1999.  A prolific author, Ms. Power’s book, A Problem from Hell:  America and the Age of Genocide, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

Born in Ireland, she immigrated to the United States at the age of nine.  She is married and has two children.

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For information media • not an official record