Thor Halvorssen

Thor Halvorssen is a human rights advocate and film producer. He is President of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an organization devoted to exposing and challenging dictatorships and their cronies. Thor's opinions and views have appeared in numerous venues including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Economist, Washington Post, NPR, TIME Magazine, Daily Telegraph, New York Post, Vice, and GQ, as well as television outlets such as Al-Jazeera, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, HBO, and many others.

At SXSW Thor will present, along with colleagues from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, and Cuba about the Real Information Revolution—which will focus on how dissidents and activists get around state censorship.

Thor is founder of the Moving Picture Institute and has produced several films that focus on human liberty including State of Control (screening at SXSW on March 14 at 6:00PM at the Violet Crown Theatre) about censorship and repression in China. Most recently Thor has been working on the screen adaptation of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a liberty-themed sci-fi cult classic written by Robert Heinlein with Bryan Singer (X-Men, Usual Suspects) set to direct.

Thor Halvorssen graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with concurrent undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science and history.

Thor created HRF after his mother, a child psychologist, was brutally gunned down in Thor’s native Venezuela by members of Hugo Chavez’s security apparatus. Thor’s first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, is currently a political prisoner of the government of Venezuela.

Beyond HRF and film production, Thor is the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, a global conference that builds a wide bridge between the defense of human freedom and the tech, philanthropy, policy, media, and art world.