Jeffrey Gedmin

Life

Gedmin was born in Washington, DC and raised in Northern Virginia. He was married In 1993 to Jeana Williams. They have a daughter.

Career

Before taking the helm at RFE/RL, Gedmin served for nearly six years as Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, a non-profit, non-partisan organization whose mission is "to foster 'enlightened' leadership and open-minded dialogue." From 1996 to 2001, Gedmin was a resident scholar and Executive Director of the American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative, a coalition of international institutes, politicians, leading journalists, and business executives seeking to revitalize and expand the Atlantic community of democracies. Leading supporters and participants included Václav Havel, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and U.S. Senators Jesse Helms and Joseph Biden.

Gedmin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the board of the Council for a Community of Democracies (Washington, D.C.) and the Program of Atlantic Security Studies (Prague, Czech Republic). In addition, he has taught at Georgetown University and Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C.

Gedmin has been a frequent contributor to leading U.S. and European newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt and The Times. Gedmin's writing has also appeared in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and he has been a regular columnist for Die Welt.

Gedmin has also authored several books, including The Hidden Hand: Gorbachev and the Collapse of East Germany (1992), and edited a collection of essays titled European Integration and the American Interest (1997). Gedmin also served as co-executive producer for two major PBS documentaries: "The Germans, Portrait of a New Nation" (1995), and "Spain's 9/11 and the Challenge of Radical Islam in Europe" (2007).

Gedmin left the Legatum Institute in early 2014. He is currently a Research Council Member at the National Endowment for Democracy, senior fellow at Georgetown University and at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue

Education

Gedmin received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in German Area Studies and Linguistics. He earned his master's degree in German Area Studies (Literature concentration) from American University in Washington, D.C. He completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from American University and also studied musicology for a year at the University of Salzburg in Austria.