Edward R. Murrow Award

 

On April 4, 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken delegated the functions and authorities of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs to Elizabeth M. Allen. On January 23, 2023, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, announced his intent to nominate Liz as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. She also served as the Assistant Secretary of Global Public Affairs from September 13, 2021, to April 4, 2022.

With over 15 years of strategic communications and public affairs experience, Liz specializes in message strategy, project and crisis management, and leadership communications. She was previously a Partner at Finsbury Glover Hering (FGH), leading integrated communications campaigns and providing strategic counsel to a range of global philanthropic, corporate, non-profit and entertainment clients. In 2020, Liz served as Vice President Kamala Harris’s communications director on the Biden-Harris Presidential campaign.

Prior to FGH, Liz spent seven years in the Obama-Biden White House, serving as Deputy Communications Director and Deputy Assistant to President Barack Obama, White House Director of Message Planning, and Deputy Director of Communications to then-Vice President Joe Biden.

During her White House tenure, Liz drove communications planning around the President’s priorities, domestic and foreign policies, and legislative and outreach strategy. She managed complex message events, groundbreaking interviews and documentaries, and press coverage for President Obama and Vice President Biden across the United States and in more than 30 foreign countries on five continents.

Liz’s former public service extends to the U.S. Department of State, where she served as Director of Public Affairs for Educational and Cultural Affairs, focusing on public diplomacy and the impact of people-to-people exchange programs and international education. She previously worked at the State Department on human trafficking and international women’s issues.

Liz is a proud Buffalo, New York, native and graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Political Science and minor in Sociology from the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Geneseo.

 

Dan Langenkamp has served in the State Department for two decades, serving until July 2022 as Embassy Kyiv’s spokesperson and press attaché, working throughout the first months of the war from the Poland/Ukraine border to assist Ukraine along with a small team of diplomats who did not evacuate to the United States. Prior to his Ukraine tour, he served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Vietnam, and Cote d'Ivoire, as well as in Washington, where he served as the head of public affairs for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, as well as on the Turkey and NATO desks and in the State Department Operations Center.

Prior to his career at the State Department, Dan worked briefly for the International Rescue Committee and the International Organization for Migration, and was a reporter for more than six years the 1990s, working for Reuters, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and other news organizations in Hungary, experiences that laid the foundation for his career in public affairs later. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Hungary from 1993-1995, holds a BA from Columbia College (1992) in New York City and a MALD (2002) from the Fletcher School. He speaks Hungarian, French, Ukrainian, Spanish, and Vietnamese, has two boys, and spends his spare time coaching soccer, running, and cycling.