Alessandro Terenzoni (he/him) is Vice President of Public Policy at Americans United. He leads Americans United’s policy team in its critical work to promote positive policy that defends and supports church-state separation at the federal and state levels.
Alessandro has dedicated his career to working for the public interest, whether as a civil-rights leader in the federal government or as an access-to-justice expert in the District of Columbia, his home of over 20 years. Before joining Americans United, he was Deputy Director of the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs. He led the office’s civil-rights enforcement and technical-assistance work, ensuring that DOJ grant recipients did not unlawfully discriminate based on race, sex, religion, disability, and other protected bases.
Formerly, he did similar work at the U.S. Department of Education, where he was a supervisory attorney in its Office for Civil Rights. His first foray in government work was at the D.C. Office of Administrative Hearings, where he created and managed one of the first self-help centers in the country for unrepresented litigants at the administrative level.
Alessandro’s commitment to public-interest law formally began when he started his legal career as a housing lawyer and advocate at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia. He now serves on the board of the Washington Council of Lawyers, D.C.’s public-interest bar association dedicated to expanding access to justice. He was a member of the adjunct faculty at the George Washington University Law School for over a decade—teaching Legal Research and Writing, Introduction to Advocacy, and Public- Interest Lawyering—and continues his service to the Law School as Vice Chair of the Dean’s Public Interest Advisory Council. Before law school, Alessandro was a middle-school teacher in Newark, New Jersey, as part of Teach for America.
He is a graduate of GW Law and Tufts University and holds a certificate in diversity and inclusion from Cornell University. He was a Wasserstein Fellow at Harvard Law School for the 2022-2023 academic year and is an alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Senior Executive Fellows Program.
