Vivien Stewart is Vice President for Education at Asia Society. She is responsible for Asia Society’s programs to promote the study of Asia and other world regions, cultures, languages, and global issues in America’s schools and for building connections between U.S. and Asian education leaders.

In the U.S. this includes working with a network of state and national education leaders; creating a national initiative to expand the teaching of Chinese; managing a prizes program to recognize excellence in international education; providing professional development and award-winning web resources for teachers and students; and developing a model network of internationally oriented schools in cities around the U.S. Internationally, she has developed a series of exchanges to share expertise between American and Asian education leaders on how to improve education to meet the demands of globalization. This includes delegations to each others’ schools; policy publications; and hosting expert meetings such as the Asia-Pacific Education Forum held in Beijing in 2006.

Ms. Stewart has had a long involvement with education and youth affairs. For ten years she directed the children and youth programs at Carnegie Corporation of New York, where she shaped reform agendas in early childhood education, urban school reform, science education, teaching as a profession, and healthy adolescent development. In addition to grantmaking, she was responsible for the management of a number of Carnegie task forces, which produced influential reports such as Turning Points and A Matter of Time. She was also instrumental in the creation of the National Center for Children in Poverty and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She has also been Senior Policy Advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, and a Visiting Scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Ms. Stewart was the recipient of the 2007 Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education, honoring innovators who are educating U.S. students for a global age. She received her BA and M.Phil degrees from Oxford University and is a trustee of a number of organizations concerned with education and international affairs.

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