Tamar Shapirois the Director of Urban and Regional Policy at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. (GMF) and has more than a decade of experience working on state, regional, and local policies related to land use, housing, transportation, and the environment in the U.S. and Europe.

Prior to joining GMF, Tamar was the Director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute and the Governors’ Institute on Community Design at Smart Growth America. In this role, she advised governors and their cabinet officials on state policies related to growth and development. Previously, Tamar Shapiro worked as an attorney at Klein Hornig, LLP, a law firm specialized in affordable housing development, where she represented public housing authorities as well as developers in mixed-finance affordable housing development deals. 

Tamar received a McCloy Fellowship in Environmental Affairs to conduct a 2010 research project on vacant property policies in former East Germany. In 1999-2000, she was a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Berlin and worked at the Berlin Administration on Urban Planning and Environment as well as the German Institute for Urban Affairs.

Tamar holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.Phil. in European Studies from Cambridge University, and a B.A. from Harvard College.