Chief of Staff

Maia Golzar Anderson currently serves as Chief of Staff for the Climate and Water Initiative. Golzar is an M.A. student at Columbia University in the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies. She is a 2023 graduate of the Barnard College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she received degrees in Political Science-Human Rights and Jewish Ethics, respectively.

Maia previously served as a Research Assistant for Dr. Mohammed Mahmoud at the Middle East Institute’s Climate and Water Program, where she conducted research on Persian Gulf ecosystems and climate diplomacy in Iran.

Maia has conducted field research on Palestinian agricultural decolonial resistance in the West Bank, transnational migration and labor rights in Morocco, and Jewish South West Asian and North African (SWANA) identity and politics. Her undergraduate thesis was titled “Natural Resource Sovereignty in the Persian Gulf: The Power of Oil to Circumvent Violent United States Hegemony.” Maia’s current M.A. research focuses on the intersection of climate imperialism and subaltern bodies in SWANA and in the diaspora. Her research draws on her upbringing in Tulsa, Oklahoma through histories of resilience against resource extraction from Black and Indigenous communities from Black Wall Street to Indigenous oil rights expropriation in the "Oil Capital of the World."

Maia studied Farsi through the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship, and is currently a Foreign Language and Area Scholarship recipient for Farsi study at Columbia University. She has additional proficiencies in French, English, and Arabic.

Areas of Expertise:

• Geopolitics of Climate Diplomacy

• Climate Resilience for Natural Resources Sovereignty 

• Climate Change and Human Rights