KEI Contributor

Maureen E. Cormack is the former Dean of the Leadership and Management School at the Foreign Service Institute. In her most recent roles, she served as the Acting Assistant Secretary and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs from 2019 to September 2021. She served as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and Senior Advisor for the 2019 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, co-hosted by the United States and The Netherlands in The Hague. She was appointed as the U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina in January 2015.

Prior to arriving in Sarajevo, Ambassador Cormack served in Washington DC as the Chief of Staff to the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL; as Principal Deputy Coordinator for the Bureau of International Information Programs, and as Executive Assistant in the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

Previously, she held the positions of Director of the Office of Western European Affairs, Deputy Director for Korean Affairs, and served as a Pearson Fellow on the Homeland Security Committee of the House of Representatives.

Overseas, she served as Press Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, Korea, as Deputy Cultural Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, and as Consul at the American Presence Post in western France, covering the regions of Brittany, Normandy, and the Loire. Maureen Cormack joined the Foreign Service in 1989 and in early assignments served as Director of the American Centers in Kwangju, South Korea and Warsaw, Poland. She returned to Washington, DC as European personnel officer for the former U.S. Information Agency.

Prior to joining the Foreign Service, she worked for the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in fundraising, public relations, and artistic management.

She also worked for the Chicago law firm of Shefsky, Saitlin, and Froelich. Ambassador Cormack has a B.A. in performing arts management from the University of Illinois, an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago and a Diplome Semestriel from the University of Paris IV. She speaks French and has studied Bosnian, Polish, Korean, and Spanish.