Nadine Farid Johnson
she/her
Nadine Farid Johnson serves as the Managing Director of PEN America Washington and Free Expression Programs. A multidisciplinary leader with a longtime focus in foreign policy and constitutional issues, she has a breadth of experience across the public and private sectors. In Washington, Nadine spearheads PEN America’s engagement with the United States government on free expression issues in the U.S. and around the globe, focusing on matters of foreign policy, tech policy, privacy, press freedom, and educational censorship. She is the co-author of PEN America’s Speech in the Machine: Generative AI’s Implications for Free Expression (2023) and its seminal report on school book bans, Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools (2022). Nadine has testified before Congress as a constitutional expert and is a frequent media contributor, with commentary in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, World Politics Review, Al Jazeera, The Hill, The Daily Beast, NPR, and other national and international publications, and appearances on outlets including PBS and CNN International.
Nadine is a former United States diplomat whose work spanned the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and multilateral affairs. She served as the executive director of the ACLU of Kansas, and was previously a professor of constitutional, international, and intellectual property law at Gonzaga University and a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.
In the private sector, Nadine worked as a patent litigator and later oversaw operations and community engagement programming at Google in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of DePauw University and Tulane Law School, and studied at the U.S. Naval War College.
