Lyric Thompson

Founder and CEO

Smiling woman with curly hair speaking into a microphone, wearing a patterned dress and holding a pen.

Lyric Thompson (she/her) is a leading global expert, professor and speaker on women’s rights, equity and inclusion who has catalyzed and led U.S. and global coalitions developing cutting-edge thinking on gender and foreign policy and shaped more than a dozen U.S. laws or executive actions on gender equality.

A nationally and internationally recognized influencer in global, national and state policy dialogues on gender equality, she is the Founder and CEO of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, a global nonprofit initiative providing thought leadership, technical assistance and coalition-building for the development and advancement feminist approaches to foreign policy. She is a professor on graduate studies in gender in foreign policy at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and the Vice Chair of the North Carolina Council for Women, to which she was appointed by Governor Roy A. Cooper following a successful effort to document the state’s child marriage problem and raise the state’s age of marriage from the lowest statutory floor in the nation.

An internationally-recognized coalition-builder, Lyric founded and leads the Global Partner Network for Feminist Foreign Policy — a multistakeholder global network bringing together progressive governments and advocates prioritizing gender equality in foreign policy — and the Coalition for a Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States, which unites foreign policy, gender, immigration, political organizing and national security groups around a vision for people, peace and planet-centered U.S. foreign policy. Her publications — including a field-shaping definition of and framework for feminist foreign policy — are widely cited by academics and have shaped nearly a dozen national frameworks, including those of Colombia, France and Mexico, among others.

In her nearly two-decade career, she has advocated on women’s rights issues at the United Nations, G7/G20, White House, State Department, USAID and the Department of Defense, as well as in capitals around the globe. From 2023-2025, Lyric was appointed to the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board, where she provided the Department of State with independent insight, advice and innovation on all aspects of arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, outer space, critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, the national security aspects of emerging technologies, international security and related aspects of public diplomacy. From 2019-2021, Lyric served as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Advisory Committee on Advancing Gender Equality in Foreign Affairs, and from 2012-2016, as a staff advisor to President Obama’s Global Development Council.

Lyric is the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including a profile as “The Future of Leadership” by Harper’s Bazaar Japan in 2026; a Next Generation Changemaker by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in 2023; the Global Woman Award for policymaking by the Global Women Peace Foundation in 2021; one of the gender equality top 100 professionals influencing global policy by Apolitical in 2019 and 2020; and the award for excellence in a campaign of women serving women by the Professional Women in Advocacy in 2016.

Lyric has served on the Editorial Board of Apolitical and writes regularly on gender and foreign policy for such outlets as the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Devex, Ms. Magazine, The Hill, ThomsonReuters Foundation and openDemocracy. She is a Phi Beta Kappa alumna of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a graduate of the Bard College Program on Globalization and International Affairs and spent a semester studying at the University of Ghana at Legon during her undergraduate career.

Follow Lyric on X (formerly Twitter) @lyricthompson.