Suzanne DiMaggio is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on U.S. foreign policy toward Asia and the Middle East. She is one of the foremost experts and practitioners of diplomatic dialogues with countries that have limited or no official relations with the United States, especially Iran and North Korea. For over two decades, she has led Track 1.5 and Track 2 conversations to help policymakers identify pathways for diplomatic progress on a range of issues, including regional security, nuclear nonproliferation, conflict prevention and resolution, crisis management, confidence building and negotiation, and bilateral relations. Her research and work draw on an approach to unofficial engagement she has been developing since the late 1990s, which began with a focus on U.S. relations with China, Russia, and Japan, and later expanded to Iran, Myanmar/Burma, and North Korea.

She directs a long-running U.S.-Iran dialogue that is often cited as a model for how to conduct informal diplomacy effectively and creatively. These efforts helped to establish a foundational basis for the secret talks between Iran and the Obama administration that led to the 2015 landmark comprehensive nuclear agreement. More recently, they helped to avoid an escalatory spiral in the lead up to and during the April 2024 Israel-Iran confrontation. Her work on North Korea included an unofficial Track 1.5 dialogue process that transitioned to official diplomatic discussions between the Trump administration and North Korean government in 2017. In 2011, she facilitated talks that brought together senior officials from Myanmar and the U.S. to exchange views on the re-establishment of relations following the transition of Myanmar’s government.

Before joining Carnegie, she held senior positions at New America, the Asia Society, and the United Nations Association. She is an Associate Senior Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a Board Director at the Iran Project, and an Advisory Board member at the National Committee on North Korea, Foreign Policy for America, and the Vienna-based Open Nuclear Network.