Alyson Curro

About Alyson

(updated 6/2017) A native of New Orleans, Louisiana, Aly Neel is a feminist working on the forefront of gender and development. After receiving her B.A. in Political Communication at Louisiana State University in 2010, she spent two and a half years in Istanbul, reporting on gender-based violence and discrimination for Today’s Zaman, the largest English-language daily in Turkey, and contributing to The Washington Post and other publications. She returned to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. There she conducted research for UN Women on the barriers female UN employees face, helped build a coalition to pass campus sexual assault legislation in Louisiana, and helped reform Princeton’s campus sexual assault policies and practices. She then worked as an adviser on civil society engagement to the UN Foundation’s Policy Team in New York, and as a Women’s Policy, Inc. (WPI) Congressional Fellow, working on gender, economic, and health policy for U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin. For her Luce year, Aly is working with  Akhaya Women , (akhaya means “essential” in Myanmar), a local women’s organization based in  Yangon, Myanmar , targeting multiple dimensions of gender inequality – including violence against women (VAW) and low representation of women in elected office and laws and policies that discriminate against women and girls.  In her spare time, Aly is writing and publishing a bilingual children’s book on exceptional women throughout history in Myanmar.  She also enjoys blogging, meditating, not so slowly eating her way through countless tea shops, and exploring the streets of Yangon with her first film camera, a funky Holga 120 found in Chiang Mai.