Susan Morton Blaustein (born 22 March 1953) is an American feminist, international development practitioner, professor, and philanthropist. She is the founder and executive director at WomenStrong International which invests in local women's organizations worldwide, brings them together to learn and share, and amplifies their solutions to improve the lives of urban women and families and to advance progress toward gender equality. Blaustein, who also teaches at Columbia University, was previously a journalist and foreign policy analyst focused on international human rights issues, and a prizewinning American composer, with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Early life and education
Susan Blaustein was born in Palo Alto, California, and was raised in Baltimore, Maryland.
Her grandfather, Jacob Blaustein, and great-grandfather, Louis Blaustein, developed the formula for a lead-free, "no-knock" gasoline in 1911 and founded the American Oil Company (AMOCO) to refine and market the product. Her grandfather also was a human rights leader who served as president of the American Jewish Committee, and advised numerous presidents, including Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson on Jewish affairs, lobbied for human rights commitments to be enshrined in the UN charter, and as co-chair of the Jewish Claims Conference Against Germany, helped lead the apportionment of reparations after the Holocaust.
Blaustein attended The Park School, an independent K-12 school in Baltimore, Maryland.
She went on to study music composition at Pomona College with Vienna-born composer Karl Kohn, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in piano and music composition in 1975. She continued her studies in composition with composer Henri Pousseur, at the Conservatoire Royale de Musique in Liège, Belgium; with Seymour Shifrin at Brandeis University; and at the Yale School of Music with Jacob Druckman, Betsy Jolas, and David Lewin, where she earned a DMA in composition in 1986.
While at the Yale School of Music, Blaustein received a number of awards and commissions, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Serge Koussevitsky Foundation and the Fromm Foundation at the Library of Congress, the American Composers Orchestra, and several chamber groups and musicians.
She then served as a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, where she fulfilled a number of commissioned works, including a cantata on the Song of Songs for mezzo-soprano, tenor, and chamber orchestra, a cello concerto, and a sextet for the New York New Music Ensemble.
Career
Blaustein's career began in music while at Yale University, where she composed her Fantasie for Piano Solo and other chamber works with the help of a grant in 1981 from the National Endowment for the Arts. During her Harvard Junior Fellowship, she completed her Song of Songs, which was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in 1985; a cello concerto, premiered in 1984 at the Library of Congress by Juilliard Quartet cellist Joel Krosnick with a chamber orchestra conducted by Paul Zukofsky; and several additional solo and chamber pieces.
She served as assistant professor of music at Columbia University from 1985 to 1989, during which time she completed her DMA from the Yale School of Music, composed numerous works, and continued to learn from her senior colleagues, Mario Davidovsky, Jacques-Louis Monod, and George Edwards.
Blaustein said she was "jolted from my ivory tower" in 1988 by her immersion in the challenges facing so many of her neighbors in Manila, Philippines, where she had gone in 1988 to fulfill her Guggenheim Fellowship when her journalist boyfriend-now-husband Alan Berlow opened National Public Radio's first Asia bureau there. It was there, she added, in addition to writing a lot of music, that "she spent time reporting in low-income urban communities and discovered her passion for telling the stories of those battling extreme poverty and injustice."
Blaustein reported on conflict, politics, economics, and social injustice from the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Mongolia; she continued to report on policy and injustice from Washington, DC, Huntsville, Texas, and the Balkans, with articles featured in such publications as The New Yorker, Harper's, The Asia Wall Street Journal, Far East Economic Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.