Elizabeth White

Elizabeth comes from a small village in Cumbria in the north of England.

She studied English Literature at Oxford and initially worked for the British Council as a teacher and teacher trainer in Ecuador.

She has an MSc from Edinburgh in Applied Linguistics, and worked for Edinburgh University on education development projects overseas before re-joining the British Council in 1993.

Her first posting was in Kazakhstan, where she set up the British Council’s first office in what was then a new sovereign state.

In 1997 she became director of St Petersburg and North-West Russia, before moving to Prague for two years when the Czech Republic joined the European Union.

In 2004 she took up her first posting in MENA working in Yemen and then in Syria, with a regional responsibility for British Council work in the arts in the Middle East.

Elizabeth worked in Syria for three years before the conflict began, and while the office was kept open for the first year of the troubles, in 2012 she moved to Beirut.

She has also completed interim postings as Acting Director to British Council in Ukraine, and then to the British Council in Turkey for three months in 2017.

Her previous post was Director South Caucasus, based in Azerbaijan, where she lived for four years.

Her interests include music, theatre, painting, climbing and fell-walking, and good conversation in many languages – she speaks seven languages fluently. (Her Arabic is reasonable but she is working hard to improve and pick up on the Egyptian aspects and nuances).