Soroush Richard Shehabi:
Soroush Richard Shehabi has three decades of experience in media, law, policy and politics, with expertise in energy/environmental security, U.S.-Iran policy and political organizing. Mr. Shehabi graduated from Harvard University where he studied international relations and global environmental security under Professors Joseph Nye and Stanley Hoffmann and earned high honors for his thesis. He received his JD at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Mr. Shehabi has worked as a financial analyst for Salomon Brothers in New York, as an attorney, first for the law firm of Christensen, White, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser & Shapiro in Los Angeles, and then for the Untied States Department of Justice in Washington during the Clinton and then Bush administrations. Mr. Shehabi’s experience in politics started with Senator Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential bid and continued with Vice President Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, General Wesley Clark presidential campaign in 2004, where he served as senior policy adviser for energy and environment, and Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign, where he served as deputy political director and constituency director for Pennsylvania under Tony Podesta. Mr. Shehabi is vice chairman of the board of Friends of the Earth and a member of the board of the Near East Foundation, one of the oldest non-profit aid and development organizations in America. Mr. Shehabi is also a founding board member of the Iranian American Bar Association and the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IAPAC), on whose board he has served since inception, from 2002 to 2014. In 2008, he helped merge IAPAC with the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), on whose board he also serves.
Currently, Mr. Shehabi is the CEO and publisher of Washington Life Magazine and an owner of Celebrity Service International, a global 70-year-old business-to-business media information company based in New York and Los Angeles. Mr. Shehabi is passionate about documentary films, and was executive producer of the “film-anthropy” project “Kicking It,” a film about the homeless world cup of soccer which debuted at the Sundance, Tribeca and SilverDocs film festivals before recouping its investment and helping support street soccer leagues in the US and abroad through theatrical, online and television distribution.