Innovating Public Diplomacy: The 2025 Ameri Prize

The USC Center on Public Diplomacy (CPD) and the U.S. State Department named Andrea Stanford, Press Officer at U.S. Embassy Mexico City, as the 2025 recipient of the Ameri Prize for Innovation in Public Diplomacy at a special award event on November 29 at the University of Southern California’s Capital Campus in Washington DC.

The annual Ameri Prize honors U.S. foreign and civil service officers for creative and scalable initiatives that advance global public diplomacy. The program was established by CPD, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of State, to promote the practice and to further build the field at a moment when public diplomacy is needed more than ever.

About Andrea Stanford

Stanford’s work has been credited with reducing illegal immigration flows during key periods, strengthening interagency coordination, and transforming the government’s ability to share reliable, credible, and timely information on U.S. immigration policy.

Stanford joins an exceptional group of past Ameri Prize recipients, including Morgan O’Brien, honored for transforming global visa communications; Alexander Hunt, recognized for integrating AI into the State Department’s public diplomacy workflows; Alys Spensley, awarded for her pioneering social and digital analytics work in Beijing; and Gretchen Franke and Chad Houghton, who developed an AI-based tool to counter propaganda in Poland.