Andrea Helen Gilbert was born in Brooklyn, New York and is a permanent legal resident of Greece since February 1989.
She has been organizing Athens Pride since its inception in 2005. In 2007 she became the legal spokesperson and administrator of the all-volunteer, non-profit Athens Pride Society.
She was Regional Director (of Balkans and SE Europe) for InterPride (International Association of Pride Organizers) from 2008 to 2011, when she was elected Vice President (2011-2012). She was also Chair of that organization’s Solidarity Fund, which she initiated. In October 2019 she and her colleague Giannis Papagiannopoulos organized the 4-day InterPride Annual General Meeting & World Conference in Athens, which hosted 400 Pride organizers and influencers from all over the world.
She was an active member of the Greek Section of Amnesty International from 1989 until 1998. Since 2000 she has been the expert on Jewish issues and anti-Semitism and leading LGBT activist for Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM). In 2011, as civil claimant with GHM, she won two landmark unanimous First Instance decisions against homophobic hate speech and libel.
As representative of GHM, she has presented at high-level OSCE Meetings in Warsaw, Vienna and Berlin and has participated in EU Commission meetings in Brussels. She was a member of the 13-person team that drafted the OSCE/ODIHR “Guidelines on the Protections of Human Rights Defenders” (2014). As a representative of Athens Pride, she has attended many international conferences and presented on Greek LGBT issues in Moscow, Ankara, Zagreb, Sofia, Rome, and elsewhere.
Andrea Gilbert has a Bachelor and Master in Fine Arts. In addition to her Human Rights activism, she is a freelance art critic and exhibitions curator. She also works as a Greek to English translator and an editor.