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 the liberation of prisoners of conscience and to the promotion of genuine liberal democracy in the Americas. A lifelong civil liberties and civil rights advocate, Halvorssen was the first Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) a free speech group he headed from its founding in 1999 until he stepped down in 2004 to create HRF. He has lectured at universities across the country on matters of liberty and his opinions and views have appeared in numerous venues including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Public Radio, TIME, National Journal, as well as television outlets such as Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity & Colmes,” MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,” CNN, and many others.

Halvorssen is the founder of the Moving Picture Institute and the producer of several feature films and documentaries that focus on human freedom including Freedom's Fury (co-produced with Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu), Hammer & Tickle (2006 winner of the Zurich Film Festival), The Sugar Babies, and the upcoming feature documentary on higher education, Indoctrinate U. He is also a contributing author to several books about freedom. 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. He lives in New York and Los Angeles.