Ambassador Kelly Keiderling is the South and Central Asian Affairs Bureau Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. She served as the U.S. Ambassador to Uruguay from 2016-2019, and as the Deputy Commandant/International Affairs Advisor and faculty member at the National War College from 2019-2021. Before her designation as U.S. Ambassador to Uruguay, she served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Prior to that Washington assignment, Ambassador Keiderling served as Deputy Chief of Mission and intermittently as Charge d’Affaires in Caracas, Venezuela. She also served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Chisinau, Moldova. In previous overseas assignments, she was Public Affairs Officer in U.S. diplomatic missions in Cuba, Botswana and Kyrgyzstan. Earlier in her career, she held diplomatic positions at U.S. embassies in the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, and Zambia. While serving in Washington at various points of her career, Ambassador Keiderling was Senior Panama Desk Officer, Public Diplomacy Desk Officer for the Caribbean, acting Deputy Director for Central American Affairs, Chief of Staff in the Iraq Office, and Strategic Language Issues Coordinator in the Bureau of Human Resources.
Ambassador Keiderling received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from the National War College in Washington, DC. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, and some Italian and Romanian. She was raised in Latin America and Portugal in a Foreign Service family.
Source: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs
