Olivia Truesdale
Program Officer
Olivia Truesdale is a Program Officer at FMC & The Congressional Study Groups, where she supports Korea programs and supervises FMC interns. She is also a current M.A. in Asian Studies student at George Washington University's Elliott School for International Affairs with specializations in Korean Studies and Global Communication & Public Diplomacy.
She was a 2022 Fulbright grantee in South Korea, where she taught English to middle schoolers in the rural suburbs of Changwon and tutored members of the North Korean defector community. Prior to Fulbright, she worked at the National Bureau of Asian Research as project associate and intern for the Political and Security Affairs Group, where she supported programs like the U.S.-ROK Next Generation Leaders Program, Strategic Asia, and the Maritime Awareness Project. Olivia is a two-time CLS scholar, participating in the 2020 and 2021 virtual institutes for Korean. In 2019, she interned at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul’s Nonimmigrant Visa Unit and studied abroad at Yonsei University. She participated in the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies’ North Korean Studies fall intensive in 2021.
Olivia graduated summa cum laude from Scripps College in 2021 with a BA in Foreign Languages (Spanish and Korean). She remains an active member of the alumnae community, serving as Chair of the Alumnae/Student Connections Committee for the Alumnae Leadership Council, as well as other volunteer roles. While at Scripps, she completed a Spanish-language thesis project on global and local cultural influences on the representation of youth experiences in South Korea and Spain. Olivia is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Delta Pi.