Diana Lady Dougan

Senior Advisor

Center for Strategic and International Studies

Ambassador Diana Lady Dougan has been a long-term pioneer in expanding the horizons of media and information technology applications and access globally. For more than three decades she served in senior strategic, communications technology, and foreign policy leadership positions in industry and government, including appointments by three U.S. Presidents (Republican and Democrat) in full Senate confirmed positions. She is a Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Chairman of Cyber Century Forum and serves on a diversity of boards and in international strategic advisory positions.

As the first statutory U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy and administratively as Assistant Secretary of State during the Reagan years, Amb. Dougan oversaw international telecom, broadcast and IT policy interests, coordinating treaty negotiations involving over a dozen U.S. federal agencies. With bipartisan support from Congress, she spearheaded a wide range of liberalizing international policy advances, significantly expanding telecom, media and IT access in developing as well as industrialized countries. In the private sector, Amb. Dougan has launched multi-country, multi-industry initiatives including founding the Global Information Infrastructure Commission (GIIC) with the World Bank and co-founding the Center for Information Infrastructure and Economic Development (CIIED) under the auspices of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing.

At age 23, Amb. Dougan was the first CATV Marketing Director and youngest executive at Time Inc. (now Time Warner). During her six years as a Director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting she played an active role in early funding and programmatic expansion of PBS and NPR. She was co-founder of the International Media Fund, Chairman of the Christian Science Monitor TV Editorial Board and served on the founding committee of the Sundance Institute. She is also an award-winning television producer for the PBS Christmas special, The Nutcracker, and the unprecedented PBS/NPR special: The MX Debate with Bill Moyers, for which she won the prestigious Peabody for “excellence in broadcast journalism.” With Impact Partners and independently, she helped produce and executive produce over two dozen award-winning feature length documentary films, including WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR (2018), JANICE LITTLE GIRL BLUE (2015) and THE COVE (2009). She won her second Peabody in 2019 for THE JUDGE, a film about the first woman Shari’a Law Judge in the Middle East.

Amb. Dougan has served on a diverse number of corporate boards: Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Qualcomm (Strategic Planning Committee Chair), Panacea Pharmaceuticals, InterDigital, TIW, Arraycom and served on strategic advisory commissions for the Prime Ministers of Ireland and Malaysia (Multi-media Super Corridor), as well as for the U.S. Government. Educational and public service boards currently include: Ron Brown Scholars, Council of American Ambassadors, University of California at San Diego’s Graduate School of Global Policy & Strategy (GPS) and the 21st Century China Center (co-founder), Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination (co-founder), Center for Commerce and Diplomacy (co-founder), the DC Environmental Film Festival, Educational Reform Foundation (chair) and the Maitri of India Foundation. She is an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Cosmos Club.

Ambassador Dougan’s opinion articles have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, among others, and her books include Climbing the Great Wall of E-Commerce (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) and Arab & Muslim Countries: Profiles in Contrast (Brookings Institute Press). She has been honored by many awards for her public service. She is also an honorary citizen of The Republic of Korea and has been accorded both personal and permanent rank of Ambassador.