Continuing a week celebrating “Icons and Instigators: Women Who Change the World,” Chautauqua proudly welcome Alyse Nelson, CEO of Vital Voices, a non-profit founded on the simple idea that nations and communities cannot move forward without women’s voices in leadership positions. In addition to her solo remarks, Nelson will be joined onstage by several women leaders whose work Vital Voices has supported and championed; several of those leaders will also provide more in-depth presentations in separate engagements during the week as part of the Institution’s Masters Series.

Alyse Nelson is president and CEO of Vital Voices Global Partnership. As the co-founder, she has been with the organization for more than 28 years, also serving as vice president and senior director of programs before assuming her current role in 2009. Under Nelson’s leadership, Vital Voices has directly served nearly 50,000 women leaders across 188 countries. Previously, Nelson served as deputy director of the State Department’s Vital Voices Global Democracy Initiative and worked with the President’s Interagency Council on Women at the White House. She is a regular speaker on leadership and global women’s issues, having spoken before the United Nations General Assembly, the Clinton Global Initiative, Fortune Most Powerful Women, Oxford Student Union, Forbes 30/50 and Women in the World, among others. She has conducted leadership training with women at the Central Intelligence Agency, DFID, the UK Development Agency, Fortune 1000 companies and at numerous conferences.

Nelson is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as an official Observer for the World Bank’s We-fi Initiative for Women Entrepreneurs. She serves on advisory boards of Chime for Change and Global Citizen. Fortune named Nelson one of the 55 Most Influential Women on Twitter and she was featured as one of Newsweek’s 150 Women Shaking the World. She is a recipient of the 2022 David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award, and, in 2018, Apolitical named her one of the most influential people in global gender policy. She was also honored in 2015 with a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award.

Nelson is the author of the best-selling book Vital Voices: The Power of Women Leading Change Around the World, and the editor of Vital Voices: 100 Women Using Their Power to Empower. She has been featured in various international and national media. She holds a B.A. from Emerson College and an M.A. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Breeze Liu is a globally recognized activist and entrepreneur reshaping the global response to online abuse. She is the founder and CEO of Alecto AI, a groundbreaking company building AI-powered infrastructure to combat online image abuse. Through her nonprofit, the Alecto Foundation, she also leads survivor-centered policy reform and international coalition building.

As a survivor of both child sexual abuse material and deepfake abuse, Liu transformed personal trauma into structural change — spearheading the historic “Take It Down Act,” the first U.S. federal law to criminalize non-consensual intimate imagery and deepfake exploitation. Her leadership has redefined the legal and technological boundaries of digital human rights.

Liu has been invited by two U.S. presidents, Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice and the United Nations to speak on technology-facilitated gender-based violence. She serves as a key advisor to global coalitions on AI regulation and digital safety, and is widely recognized as a pioneering voice demanding accountability from some of the world’s most powerful platforms. Prior to founding Alecto AI, Liu led trust and safety initiatives in big tech and built a successful career in venture capital. A graduate of UC Berkeley in peace and conflict studies, she combines legal foresight, technical innovation and philosophical depth to build scalable systems of justice.

Leah Lizarondo is the vice president of global network and issue advocacy at Vital Voices with over 15-year of experience of entrepreneurship and global product/brand leadership in social enterprise, technology and consumer products. She has expertise in taking complex ideas to effectively message, mobilize and drive mass movement with a focus on climate action.

Prior to joining Vital Voices, Lizarondo co-founded 412 Food Rescue and founded Food Rescue Hero, a technology-enabled, people-powered movement against food waste, hunger and sustainability change. Her work at Food Rescue Hero has been recognized with the WE Empower UN SDG award and the Global Leadership award at Vital Voices. Her career has spanned global experience in technology, consumer goods and nonprofits.

Kakenya Ntaiya is a world-renowned advocate for women’s rights and the CEO and President of Kakenya’s Dream. She has dedicated her life to creating lasting change in rural communities in Kenya and across Africa.

After escaping child marriage and surviving female genital mutilation (FGM) as a young teenager, Ntaiya became the first woman from her indigenous Maasai village in Kenya to attend university in the United States. In 2009, while studying for her Ph.D. in education at the University of Pittsburgh, she founded Kakenya’s Dream, a nonprofit organization that empowers at-risk girls through holistic education, health and skills development to become agents of change. Today, under Ntaiya’s visionary leadership, Kakenya’s Dream has evolved into a global team scaling a replicable model for girls’ empowerment, gender equality and social norms change across rural Africa.

Ntaiya was featured in Bill Gates’ Heroes in the Field series in 2022 and Melinda French Gates’ first book, The Moment of Lift. She has been named a Top Ten CNN Hero, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and one of Newsweek’s “150 Women Who Shake the World.”

Ariela Suster is the founder of SEQUENCE, a handcrafted accessories company that exclusively employs young people who are most vulnerable to gang recruitment and focuses on programs that support their personal and professional development.

Born and raised in El Salvador, Suster has lived a life tainted by the unexpected having grown up during the Salvadoran Civil War. No stranger to violence, she saw firsthand the harrowing effects of war during a period that included the kidnapping of her brother, military invasions, shootings in her home, and car bombs in her neighborhood. Rocked to the core at an early age, Suster made a conscious decision to change the sequence of events that kept her country and its people in a pervasive cycle of violence and destruction.

Suster has successfully taken SEQUENCE beyond El Salvador using her unique brand of collaboration that has allowed her to form advantageous partnerships with entities like Microsoft, MAC Cosmetics, Universal Pictures, Bank of America, Deloitte and Vital Voices.

Suster graduated from Skidmore College and completed a Graduate Certificate Program at Harvard University.

This program is made possible by Week One Presenting Sponsor Erie Insurance. This program is also supported by The Richard W. and Jeannette D. Kahlenbergy Lectureship Fund and The June and Albert Bonyor Lecturship Fund.