Nadine Farid Johnson is the inaugural policy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. She is responsible for the Institute’s policy and advocacy efforts, leading engagement with U.S. government and other officials to advance the Institute’s policy objectives.

A former U.S. diplomat and professor of law and political science, Farid Johnson is a frequent media contributor, with commentary appearing 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. She has also appeared on outlets including PBS and CNN International.

Farid Johnson comes to the Knight Institute most recently from PEN America, where she served as the managing director of that organization’s Washington office and Free Expression Programs, focusing on foreign policy, tech policy, privacy, press freedom, and educational censorship. She co-authored several PEN America reports, including Speech in the Machine: Generative AI’s Implications for Free Expression, and testified before Congress as a constitutional expert.  

At the State Department, Farid Johnson’s 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, Farid Johnson 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. Farid Johnson is currently a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, writing on human rights and national security. She resides in Washington, D.C.