The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2019 63 AFSA NEWS Christopher Teal is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. He is currently on a faculty assignment at the Inter-Amer- ican Defense College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. He recently completed an Una Chapman Cox Fellowship, for which he directed, wrote and produced a documen- tary on the first African American diplomat, Ebenezer D. Bas- sett. The film, “A Diplomat of Consequence,” tells the story of this groundbreaking diplomat 150 years after his appointment. Mr. Teal previously served as the consul general at the U.S. consulate in Nogales, Mexico, and held public affairs positions in Sri Lanka; Mexico; Peru; and the Dominican Republic. In Washington, D.C., he also worked in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs and at the Foreign Press Center. He joined the State Department in 1999 and previously served on the FSJ Editorial Board from 2004 to 2007. Joe Tordella is a Foreign Service officer currently serving as spokesperson for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. Before this assignment, he was a special assistant to the under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. He also served as the public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in Moldova. A communications strategist by vocation, he has also served in public diplomacy assignments in Moscow, Islamabad, Tripoli, Manila, Tel Aviv and Riyadh. Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 2007, Mr. Tordella worked as a strategy consultant for IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton. He has a graduate degree from the London School of Economics and an undergraduate degree from American University. He speaks Spanish and Russian, and, he notes, “pretends to still speak Arabic, and stumbles through heavily New Jersey-accented English.” Vivian Walker is executive director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Following a 26-year career with the State Department, she retired as a Minister Counselor in 2014 and became a teacher, writer and researcher. She has served as a faculty fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy and editor of the CPD Perspec- tive series, as an adjunct professor at the Central European University’s School of Public Policy, and as a research fellow at the CEU Center for Media, Data and Society. Ms. Walker has also been a professor of national security strategy at the National War College in Washington, D.C., and at the National Defense College of the United Arab Emirates. She has published and lectured extensively on the practice of public diplomacy in complex information environments. She graduated from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and earned her doctorate in English language and literature from the University of Chicago. Laurence Wohlers is a retired diplomat and the current board chair of Youth for Understanding, a nonprofit with a 70-year history of working on youth exchanges. During a 36-year diplomatic career, he served as ambassador to the Central African Republic, minister counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Mission to the European Union, and minister counselor for public affairs in Moscow, as well as other postings in Africa and Japan. After retiring, he returned to the CAR as the deputy special representative of the U.N. Secretary General (DSRSG) to help set up the new peace- keeping mission (MINUSCA) there. Since leaving MINUSCA, Amb. Wohlers has returned to the department for short-term assignments including as interim special representative for the African Great Lakes and as head of delegation for the Secu- rity Governance Initiative in Niger and Mali. He also served as interim director of the Fulbright Program in Belgium. n