Azish Filabi
Azish Filabi, JD, MA, is the Executive Director, The American College Maguire Center for Ethics in Financial Services and the Charles Lamont Post Chair of Business Ethics and Associate Professor. Azish’s career has spanned private, non-profit, regulatory and academia.
Prior to joining the College, she was a member of the BlackRock Investment Stewardship team, where she led the corporate governance, sustainability and proxy voting considerations relating to a portfolio of companies in which BlackRock is invested on behalf of its clients.
From 2015—2019, Azish was the Executive Director of Ethical Systems, an organization housed at the NYU Stern School of Business. Through research and collaboration with leading social and behavioral scientists, she dedicated her time to helping business distill findings from academic research, and develop strategies to measure and promote ethical culture in their organizations. She was also a Sr. Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor at NYU/Stern.
Azish started her career as a corporate lawyer at the NYC-based law firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, LLP. She then worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of NY for eight years, from 2007 – 2015, serving as an Assistant VP, Ethics Officer and Counsel in the Legal Group. Her time at the Fed spanned the Global Financial Crisis, and she was part of various teams that structured both the direct and broad-based lending facilities that supported the markets at that time. Later, as an Ethics Officer, she managed a conflicts of interest program for financial institution supervisors, also providing training and outreach relating to the Code of Conduct and ethics guidelines.
Azish has presented on business ethics and corporate culture at various forums, including the OECD, the NY State Bar Association, the Ethics and Compliance Initiative (ECI), Thomson Reuters, the 1LoD conference, the Conference Board, the Good Work Institute, among others. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, Fortune, Kiplinger, Wolters Kluwer, and Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence.
She is an active member of the community, currently the Chair-Elect of the NY State Bar Association International Section, where she also co-founded the Committee on Social Finance and Enterprise. She has served on a number of non-profit boards, including the National Lymphedema Network, and the East Coast Greenway Alliance. She also previously served as a member of the Board of Trustees for USQ Core Real Estate Fund, a ’40 Act Fund providing investment opportunities to retail investors in commercial real estate.
Azish was born in Mashhad, Iran and immigrated to the U.S. in the early ‘80s. She has a B.A. as an Echols Interdisciplinary Scholar from the University of Virginia (UVA), a J.D. from the UVA School of Law, and a M.A. in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).