As the prize and grants associate, Sasha Burshteyn plays a key role in ensuring streamlined implementation of program initiatives and administrative processes, and supports the growing needs of the Prizes and Grants programs. In collaboration with the program officer and grants officer, she assists in the strategic execution of the foundation’s evaluation strategies and the development of the Programs Department.

Prior to her work at the Vilcek Foundation, Burshteyn served as program manager and operations coordinator at the Watson Foundation, where she supported all programmatic and communications aspects of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, managed the foundation’s Salesforce database, and supported fellows as a mentor, workshop facilitator, and summer journal reader.

Burshteyn lived and worked in Eastern Europe in 2018, where she developed documentary poems about the Seven Natural Wonders of Ukraine with support from National Geographic. She was named a Thomas J. Watson Fellow from 2016–2017 and spent her fellowship year independently studying narratives of social upheaval in Northern Ireland, South Africa, India, Georgia, and Guatemala.

Burshteyn holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Fellow, and taught creative writing workshops for permanent residents at Roosevelt Island’s Coler-Goldwater Hospital. She was born in Russia and raised in Brooklyn and Donbas.