At the invitation of the Foreign Policy Association, international PR consultant Giosetta Capriati, who has spent her life between the United States and Italy, will be hosting a lecture series on womens’ empowerment, whose first speaker will be Panamanian Natalia Kanem, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Capriati’s relationship with the country’s oldest and longest-running think tank runs deep, as she has previously been named an adviser to the organization’s president, Noel V. Lateef.
“When it was time to organize, I decided I wanted to celebrate the empowerment of women,” Capriati said. It ties in with another lecture on the same theme, established last year in honor of her sister Alba at New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. Capriati and Kanem will center their respective experiences to reflect on the role and impact of women in society on the first day of the lecture series, March 18, at The University Club of New York (1 W 54th St.).
Giosetta Capriati considers herself a “traffic cop in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” she tells La Voce. Arriving in the United States in the 1960s, she has dedicated her life to changing the perception of Italians in the United States, and that of Americans in Italy, by organizing events and promoting the culture in all domains, from medicine to humanitarian activities, to gastronomy.
For more than three decades, Dr. Kanem has held top roles promoting humanitarian missions and research on medicine, public health, peace, international development, human rights, and social justice. Before becoming executive director of UNFPA, she served as deputy director and UNFPA representative in the United Republic of Tanzania from 2014 to 2016.
