Louis Bickford

Louis Bickford has worked on the collective memory of past episodes of violence, conflict, genocide, or crimes against humanity for over 20 years. As the Director of the “Memory, Monuments, and Museums” program at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), where he was a founding staff member (2001) and a member of the leadership team (2002-2010), he worked on memory and accountability in countries as diverse as Bosnia, Cambodia, Canada, Ghana, Morocco, and Peru, among others. He later worked at RFK Human Rights as a member of the Executive Leadership team, and as the director of the European Office. From 2012-2017, he managed the Global Human Rights program at the Ford Foundation. He has consulted on truth commissions, memory, memorials, sites, and museums, as well as philanthropic strategies in human rights more broadly, with various national and international institutions including the United Nations and various philanthropic foundations in every world region. He is currently the Founder and CEO of MEMRIA (www.memria.org), a social enterprise which develops partnerships with organizations to collect, analyze, and circulate narrative accounts of past violence with the aim of strengthening human rights and collective memory, and is collaborating with the Truth Commission in Colombia on a community history-telling project. Bickford is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University and New York University, where he teaches regular graduate seminars on human rights. He has a PhD from McGill University and an MA from the New School, both in Political Science.