Alexander Papachristou

Alexander Papachristou is Executive Director of the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice. He directs the organization’s overall operations and focuses on its programmatic and institutional initiatives, as well as fundraising. He co-founded Reporters Shield and leads the legal work of that global program to defend public interest journalism. Alex serves as the board secretary of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, board member of Bard College Berlin, and member of the advisory boards of the Prison Journalism Project and the Environmental Reporting Collective. He recently served on the European Commission Anti-SLAPP Working Group. Alex was previously president of the Near East Foundation, a participatory, community-based economic and social development organization working in Arab and African countries. For the preceding 18 years, he engaged in cross-border corporate finance in advisory and proprietary roles: he served as managing director and general counsel at NCH Capital, which invests in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; he lived in Russia from 1989 to 1993, where he opened and ran the Moscow office of White & Case. Alex also worked in the law firm of Clifford & Warnke in Washington, DC and was policy assistant to New York Governor Mario Cuomo. He served as law clerk to US District Judge Myron H. Thompson in the Middle District of Alabama. In 2011, The New Press published Blind Goddess: A Race and Justice Reader, which he edited. Alex received an LL.M. and JD from Harvard Law School and an AB from Princeton University, as well as Arabic language training at the American University in Cairo.