The Asia Foundation Elects Markos Kounalakis, Jacqueline Lundquist to Board of Trustees

San Francisco, November 1, 2019 — The Asia Foundation, a nonprofit international development organization committed to improving lives across a dynamic and developing Asia, announces the election of two new members to its Board of Trustees at its September 2019 meeting: Markos Kounalakis and Jacqueline Lundquist.

Dr. Markos Kounalakis is an author, publisher, journalist, and scholar. During the 1980s and 1990s, Kounalakis worked as a foreign correspondent, covering wars and revolutions for Newsweek and as the NBC-Mutual News Moscow correspondent. He reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall and lived in the Soviet Union during its collapse. He reported the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the outbreak of ethnic strife and war in Yugoslavia. Kounalakis was also president and publisher of the Washington Monthly magazine and chairman of the Internews Network. Kounalakis is currently a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University. He writes a widely-read weekly syndicated foreign affairs column for the Miami Herald and McClatchy. He is a presidentially appointed member of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and a board member at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy, and at America Abroad Media. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, California’s Lieutenant Governor Amb. Eleni Kounalakis, and their two Mandarin-speaking teenage sons, Neo and Eon.

Ms. Jacqueline Lundquist is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she earned a degree in Rhetoric and Communications and Foreign Languages, and of the Alliance Francaise in Paris. She co-founded a prominent Washington, DC-based public relations firm, reported for CBS television, and for seven years, worked with The Beach Boys. She has worked on National Community Service issues for President George Bush, Sr. and President Bill Clinton. Her project, STARSERVE, was President Bush’s first Point of Light Initiative and engaged 30+ celebrities to promote community service among K-12 students. Lundquist’s husband, Richard Celeste, served as Ambassador to India under President Clinton from 1997-2001. As first lady of the US in India, she worked on HIV/AIDS, women’s and children’s causes, the environment, breast cancer awareness and the promotion of fashion and the arts. Her deep love of India spawned business enterprises including a fashion company, Karma, promoting Indian fashion designers in the US and a jewelry company, I’m Sari, sold in the US at Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord and Taylor. In 2002, she was awarded the “Special Award for Contribution to Promotion of Indian Fashion Globally” at the Zee Gold Bollywood Awards in New York City. Currently, she is VP of Corporate Affairs and Chief Serendipity Officer at WaterHealth International, which works in over 1,000 sites in India and Africa bringing clean safe drinking water to millions of people; providing jobs and opportunities to women; and eradicating plastic in hotels, corporate offices, and communities. She has also co-authored three books, one with her son and two with her father.

The Asia Foundation is a nonprofit international development organization committed to improving lives across a dynamic and developing Asia. Informed by six decades of experience and deep local expertise, our work across the region addresses five overarching goals—strengthen governance, empower women, expand economic opportunity, increase environmental resilience, and promote regional cooperation.

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