Throughout her three decade career in foreign policy, Ambassador Kelley E. Currie has specialized in human rights and non-traditional national security issues, with a focus on the Indo-Pacific region.
Ambassador Currie is currently a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, with a joint affiliation to the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Freedom and Prosperity Center. She is a founding partner of Kilo-Alpha Strategies, a boutique geopolitical advisory firm, and serves on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy and the advisory boards of Spirit of America, the Vandenberg Coalition, and the Global Taiwan Institute. After serving on the Board of Governors at the East-West Center, Ambassador Currie was appointed a Senior Adjunct Fellow in 2024. From 2021-2023, she was an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security’s Indo-Pacific Security Project.
Ambassador Currie was unanimously confirmed in July 2017 as the United States Representative to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and Alternative Representative to the UN General Assembly under Ambassador Nikki Haley. She subsequently served as acting senior official for the Department of State’s Office of Global Criminal Justice (2019) and Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues (2020-2021).
From 2009 to 2017, Ms. Currie was a Senior Fellow with the Project 2049 Institute, where she founded and directed the Institute’s Burma Transition Initiative. She previously held senior policy positions with the Department of State, U.S. Congress, and non-governmental organizations. She has frequently testified before and briefed congressional committees and bodies, advised international organizations, and appears regularly in major media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Journal of Democracy, and Just Security.
Ambassador Currie received her Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center with a focus on International Human Rights Law and her bachelor’s degree from the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia.