Katherine Wilhelm

Katherine Wilhelm is Executive Director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. She is an expert on China’s legal system, public interest law organizations, and civil society. She joined USALI in August 2019 after returning from nearly three decades of residence in Asia, where she split her career between law and journalism. Most recently, she was the legal program officer at the Ford Foundation’s China office, where she funded Chinese legal advocacy NGOs and university-based legal research and education programs. Before that, she directed the Beijing office of Yale Law School’s China Law Center. Wilhelm also practiced corporate law in the Beijing office of a leading U.S. law firm. Before beginning her career in law, she reported for The Associated Press from Beijing, Hong Kong, and Hanoi, and for the Far Eastern Economic Review from Hong Kong and Shanghai. Her work has been published in leading newspapers around the world. She was a John S. Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University in 1996-1997. She holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, a Master’s degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University, a Master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a Bachelor’s degree in history from Niagara University.