Rosa Celorio is the Burnett Family Associate Dean and Professorial Lecturer for International and Comparative Legal Studies. In this capacity, she directs the International and Comparative Law program at GW Law, and teaches the courses International Human Rights of Women, Regional Protection of Human Rights, and Fundamental Issues in US Law. Previously, she worked for more than a decade as Senior Attorney for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), one of the main organs of the regional human rights protection system for the Americas, where she held several leadership positions, including the supervision of all the legal work performed by the specialized Rapporteurships on women, LGBTI persons, indigenous peoples, racial discrimination, and children. 

Dean Celorio has worked in the field of international human rights law, intersectional discrimination, and gender issues for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM-currently UN Women) in New York and Ecuador; and as a lawyer in the law firms of Murphy, Hesse, Toomey and Lehane in Boston and O’Neill & Borges in Puerto Rico. She has also acted as an advisor for several global initiatives implemented by various United Nations Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups. Between 2013 and 2014, she taught the Human Rights Fact-Finding Practicum at Georgetown University Law Center, with a focus on statelessness and economic, social, and cultural rights. The resulting report received the 2014 award of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for outstanding student research in the field of statelessness. She has appeared in various media outlets, including CNN and Deutsche Welle.

Among her recent activities, Dean Celorio is currently serving as the Chair of the Membership Committee and the Next Generation Initiative of the American Society of International Law (ASIL). She is also acting as the International Human Rights Dispute Resolution Authority between the Maya Indigenous Peoples and the government of Belize, reporting before the Caribbean Court of Justice. She is a Senior Advisor to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) in the drafting of its new General Recommendation on Indigenous Women and Girls. In addition, she joined the OAS electoral mission to Costa Rica to observe the 2020 elections as a senior gender expert, and was an invited professor at the Masters of Human Rights Law of the University of Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, in 2020. 

Dean Celorio is the author of the upcoming book Women and International Human Rights in Modern Times: A Contemporary Casebook, to be published by Edward Elgar Publishing. Among her recent publications are "Several Steps Forward, One Backward: Climate Change, Latin America, and Human Rights Resilience," 34 Md. J. Int'l L. 96 (2019); and "Discrimination and the Regional Human Rights Protection Systems: The Enigma of Effectiveness," 40 U. Pa. J. Int’l L. 781 (2019). She also worked on the textbook International Human Rights: Problems of Law, Policy and Practice, co-authored with Professors Dinah L. Shelton, Hurst Hannum, and S. James Anaya (Wolters Kluwer, 6th ed. 2018). 

Dean Celorio is from Puerto Rico. She has offered presentations on different human rights issues in more than 30 countries in Asia, Central America, North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. She has received a number of awards for her work in the field of human rights, including the Personality of the Future Fellowship by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France, and the Amnesty International Patrick Stewart Scholarship.  

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