Swanee Hunt is President of Hunt Alternatives, which for more than three decades has advanced innovative and systemic approaches to social change at local, national, and global levels. Her work related to combating the demand for illegal purchased sex (including trafficking) and promoting the full inclusion of women leaders in international security processes spans more than sixty countries.

From 1993 to 1997, Dr. Hunt served as President Clinton’s ambassador to Austria, where she hosted negotiations and international symposia focused on the warring Balkan states, which had descended into bloodshed and destruction.  At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she is the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy, founder of the Women and Public Policy Program (a research center she directed for a decade), core faculty at the Center for Public Leadership, and senior adviser at the Carr Center for Human Rights. She holds two masters degrees, a doctorate in theology, and six honorary degrees.

Ambassador Hunt has been a syndicated columnist and authored articles for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy Magazine, New York Times, L.A. Times, International Herald Tribune, et al. Her first book, This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, won the 2005 PEN/New England Award for non-fiction. She has also authored Half-Life of a Zealot, Worlds Apart: Bosnian Lessons for Global Security and Rwandan Women Rising (2017, analyzing how women became an effective 64% of the parliament, half the supreme court, and half the president’s cabinet).

Swanee Hunt summited Kilimanjaro with two new knees, for which she reserves bragging rights for decades to come. A photographer (six one-woman shows) and composer (“The Witness Cantata”), she was married for 25 years to international conductor and impresario Charles Ansbacher. Her world includes their three children, plus a menagerie of cat, parrot, horses, bison, and grandchildren.