Tamar Gurchiani

Deputy Chief of Party at the USAID Civil Society Engagement Program

Tamar Gurchiani serves as the Deputy Chief of Party at the USAID Civil Society Engagement Program, which is implemented by EWMI in Georgia. Additionally, she is an Associate Professor and holds the Human Rights Chair at Ilia State University School of Law. Tamar is an alumna of the Edmund Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program, earning her LL.M from William & Mary Law School in the United States in 2011. She completed her LL. B at Tbilisi State University in 2003 and pursued studies in philosophy and social science at Ilia State University from 2003 to 2006. In 2023, she participated in the Fulbright Faculty Development Program at Washington College of Law, American University, in Washington, D.C.

Her professional background includes six years with the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA), a prominent human rights NGO based in Tbilisi. Tamar also served as an instructor in Human Rights at the Academy of the Ministry of Interior of Georgia for two years and has been a trainer at the Legal Education Support Foundation (GYLA) for four years. In 2011, she was a visiting fellow at both the National Security Archive (a non-profit organization at George Washington University) and the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, D.C. Between 2012 and 2015, Tamar worked with various organizations on human rights, democracy, and electoral issues in countries including Georgia, Ukraine, Iraq, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

Currently, she is a board member of the International Partnership for Human Rights, a Brussels-based international human rights NGO.