As Chief of Party for GIF, Brittany (Bee) Piovesan manages a 3-year, $16.2M, USAID-funded flagship global Internet Freedom initiative focused on advancing digital security and digital rights in 39 countries around the world. Bee provides overall strategic guidance and leadership to the GIF program, which includes working directly with a consortium of over 60 NGOs and overseeing a team of 15 staff.
For the better part of the last decade, Bee has spent her professional life thinking about the internet and its possibilities. Prior to rejoining Internews in 2021, Bee almost two years at the Internet Society as the first Program Officer responsible for building its newly established foundation (the Internet Society Foundation). In this role, she set up and built out funding programs focused on digital literacy, Internet governance, and supporting grassroots organizations leverage the Internet to address the problems in their communities. Prior to this, Bee worked as Senior Program Officer with Internews’ Global Technology team, managing a range of projects aimed at ensuring that the internet remains open and secure. Through this work, she supported internet freedom advocates and civil society organizations from around the world who fight to protect human rights online. Before joining Internews, Bee worked as a Cybersecurity Policy Advisor with Shared Services Canada. In that role, she led research into IT trends, built policy networks and developed a fondness for bad computer jokes.
Bee has an undergraduate degree in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Ottawa and a graduate degree in Islamic History and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. She speaks English, French, and Spanish, as well as few well-practiced sentences in Arabic, Turkish and Italian. She has yet to meet a dumpling she does not love.
Bee is based in Washington, DC.
