Masha Lisitsyna is a human rights advocate living in New York. Masha brings three decades of experience in civil society organizations and philanthropy. She spent the last 15 years with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), where she served in several senior program manager roles. Her work with OSF’s Global Programs included a focus on the protection of human rights defenders and civic space, and with Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), she led the work to advance prevention, accountability, and reparations for torture around the world. Prior to OSF, Masha served as a Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, and earlier in her career was the founding executive director of a human rights NGO in Kyrgyzstan. Masha has been on the forefronts of protection and expanding civic space in her own country, where civil society for two decades was able to push back against repressive NGO laws. She has been engaged in legal and policy reforms on expanding civic space through strengthened Constitutional guarantees as a member of 2005 Kyrgyzstan’s Constitutional Assembly, new law on freedom of information and other. While at OSF, she was responsible for a part of global portfolio on democratic freedoms. In addition to discussing funding, sustainability and governance with the organizations in almost every region of the world, she was part of strategy discussions, training and joint advocacy efforts. Among other publications, she recently co-authored global studies on judicial reparations “Repairing from the Bench” and on investigations of crimes committed by the police “Who Polices the Police?”. Masha has also published op-eds in Bloomberg Law, Americas Quarterly, Just Security, Nation (Kenya) and other. Lisitsyna has been recognized by the World Economic Forum in 2009 as a Young Global Leader.