Lyric Thompson

Lyric Thompson (she/her) is the Founder and CEO of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, where she publishes and advises governments and thought leaders on feminist foreign policy. In her 2-decade career, she has advocated on women’s rights issues at the United Nations, G7/G20, White House, the U.S. State Department, USAID and the Department of Defense. She is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University, where she teaches a graduate level course on women’s rights advocacy, and a member of the Secretary of State's International Security Advisory Board.

Lyric is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Advisory Committee on Advancing Gender Equality in Foreign Affairs and coordinates the Global Partner Network for Feminist Foreign Policy and the Coalition for a Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States. In her home state, Lyric serves as Vice Chair of the North Carolina Council for Women, to which she was nominated by Governor Roy Cooper, and a board member of the advocacy organization North Carolina Women United.

In 2023, Lyric was selected as a Next Generation Changemaker by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; in 2021, Lyric was presented with the Global Woman Award by the Global Women P.E.A.C.E. Foundation; in 2020 and 2019, Lyric was named one of the gender equality top 100 professionals influencing global policy by Apolitical and in 2017, she was awarded the Excellence in Advocacy for a Campaign of Women Serving Women Award by Professional Women in Advocacy for her work shaping the U.S. Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls. In 2021 and 2016, Lyric served as a delegate on the United States Delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. In 2014, she was an expert advisor on the UN Human Rights Council report on discrimination against women in law and practice.

Lyric writes regularly on gender and foreign policy for such outlets as the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Devex, Ms. Magazine, The Hill, Thomson-Reuters Foundation and openDemocracy. She is a Phi Beta Kappa alumna of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a graduate of the Bard College Program on Globalization and International Affairs.

Previously, Lyric has served as: the Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Strategy at the International Center for Research on Women, the founding co-chair of the Coalition for Women’s Economic Empowerment and Equality, co-chair of Girls Not Brides USA, on the Executive Committee of the Civil Society Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, on the Women’s Human Rights Coordination Group of Amnesty International, USA and as the Senior Policy Manager for Women for Women International.