Nina Shea

Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Religious Freedom

Nina Shea is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute. Ms. Shea has been a human rights lawyer for over 30 years. She works extensively for the advancement of individual religious freedom and other human rights in US foreign policy as it confronts an ascendant Islamic extremism, and other authoritarian regimes. She advocates in defense of those persecuted for their religious beliefs and identities and on behalf of diplomatic measures to end religious repression and violence abroad, whether from state actors or extremist groups.

Ms. Shea was appointed by the US House of Representatives to serve as a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom seven times from 1999 to 2012. She also served as a member of the Clinton administration's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad.

She is the co-author of Silenced: How Apostasy & Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her most recent book, which she also co-authored, is Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2013). She regularly presents testimony before Congress, delivers public lectures, organizes briefings and conferences, and writes frequently on religious freedom issues in leading publications.

For the ten years prior to joining Hudson, Ms. Shea worked at Freedom House, where she directed the Center for Religious Freedom, an entity which she had helped found in 1986 as the Puebla Institute.

Ms. Shea is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia. She is a graduate of Smith College, and American University's Washington College of Law.