Colleen Thouez is senior fellow at The New School’s Zolberg Institute where she directs the Global Cities portfolio. She taught a new course on ‘Cities and Migration’ simultaneously with classrooms in Paris and Montréal..
From 2018-2021, Dr. Thouez served as the inaugural director of the Welcoming and Inclusive Cities Division at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), where she launched the Mayors Migration Council (MMC) and its Global Cities Fund for Pandemic Relief (2019), the Africa-Europe Mayors Dialogue (2020), and the US-based University Alliance for Refugees and At-Risk Migrants (2018). Prior to this, she held leadership positions at the United Nations in the dual fields of adult education and international migration: first, as the Head of the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the UN’s main training arm in New York from 2004-2010, and later, as special advisor to the late Sir Peter Sutherland, the UN Secretary-General’s representative on migration until 2018. At the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, she co-founded Europe Prykhystok, a locally-led effort to provide short-term refuge for hundreds of displaced and recently orphaned children.
Dr. Thouez advises national governments, municipal governments, regional bodies, the UN, the World Bank and public and private universities, amongst others. Her most recent publications are “New power configurations: city mobilization and policy change” (2022) in Global Networks; and “Cities as emergent international actors in the field of migration” (2020), Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations. Dr. Thouez is currently also a senior visiting fellow at SciencesPo Paris. She has a Ph.D. from Tufts University, and has been a fellow at Duke and Columbia Universities.