Sussan Tahmasebi
(She/Her)
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, Sussan 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, Sussan was based in Iran, where she worked on promoting women’s rights and building the capacity of civil society. She continues to maintain strong ties to Iranian civil society and the women’s movement.
In fact, Femena’s focus on supporting WHRDs, their initiatives, and progressive feminist movements in contexts where civil society space is constrained and there is growing extremism, authoritarianism, and conflict stems from Sussan’s decades-long work as a feminist activist in Iran and the broader MENA region and a desire to center feminists' progressive perspectives in regional and international policy efforts.
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, including the BBC, France 24, The World (PRX), the New York Times, Guardian, El-Pais, and other news outlets. She also has authored or co-authored numerous articles on women’s rights and the women’s movements in Iran and the region.
In 2010 and 2011 Tahmasebi was honored for her work in Iran by Human Rights Watch with the Alison Des Forges Award for extraordinary activism, HRW’s highest honor. In 2011 she was named by Newsweek as one of 150 women who “Shake the World.” In 2016 she was awarded the Power to Inspire award by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta Georgia, where her work as an advocate of women’s rights in Iran is featured. In 2016, Tahmasebi was honored by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) as a feminist activist who will make you hopeful for a future without fundamentalism.
Tahmasebi 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, which focuses on ensuring that grassroots women’s groups in the MENA region have the resources necessary to advocate for women’s rights. She is Iranian and American by birth, fluent in both English and Farsi, and currently lives in the US.