Gillian Caldwell serves as Deputy Assistant Administrator at the US Agency of International Development (USAID) providing oversight of technical teams advising missions in 80 countries worldwide in areas including climate, energy, infrastructure and engineering, ocean plastics pollution, environmental and social risk analysis, biodiversity and land resource and governance work. She also serves as USAID's Chief Climate Officer where she is responsible for helping guide and oversee USAID’s climate and environment work across the agency.

Caldwell is a filmmaker and an attorney who has worked to protect human rights and the environment throughout her career. Prior to joining USAID, she consulted on strategic planning and organizational development with a range of clients from across the NGO, government, university, business and philanthropic sectors, and also served as the CEO of Global Witness, an international NGO with a focus on tackling climate change and deploying investigations into corruption and natural resource extraction to drive systems change worldwide.

From 2007-2010, she launched and led OneSky, a highly collaborative cross-sector campaign with over 600 allied organizations to pass legislation in the US to address the climate crisis. Prior to launching the OneSky campaign, Caldwell was the Executive Director of WITNESS, co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel, which uses the power of video to open the eyes of the world to human rights abuses. Caldwell led WITNESS' rapid expansion during her decade of leadership and helped produce over 30 documentary shorts and films for use in systems-changing advocacy campaigns in partnership with NGOs in dozens of countries around the world.

Widely recognized as a leading social entrepreneur, Caldwell is also co-editor and author of "Video for Change: A Guide to Advocacy and Activism." She received her BA from Harvard University and a JD from Georgetown University, where she was recognized as a Public Interest Law Scholar. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Echoing Green Fellowship, the Skoll Award, the Schwab Foundation Award, and an Ashoka Award and was named a Director’s Fellow by MIT’s Media Lab. She was also honored with a Next Generation Leadership Award by the Rockefeller Foundation.

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