Sussan Tahmasebi

Sussan Tahmasebi is the Executive Director and the Co-founder of Femena, an organization that promotes women’s rights and supports women human rights defenders, their organizations, and feminist movements in the SWANA region. Prior to establishing Femena, she worked for over 20 years to promote women’s rights, peace and security with a focus on the SWANA region, at the national, regional and international levels. Between 1999-2011, Tahmasebi was based in Iran, where she worked on promoting women’s rights and building the capacity of civil society.
Tahmasebi’s expertise includes movement building in repressive contexts, reform of women’s rights in Muslim societies, civil society capacity building, and women’s peace and security in the SWANA region, among other issues. Tahmasebi regularly comments and speaks with leading news outlets about developments in Iran and the region, and is a member of the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch‘s Middle East and North Africa Division, a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), and a board member of the Doria Feminist Fund. She is Iranian and American by birth, fluent in both English and Farsi, and currently lives in the US.