Andrea Riester is Deputy Head of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) Sector Project Migration and Development. Before joining GIZ in 2004, she worked at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Migration Department in Paris.
In 2011, she received her PhD in social anthropology from Martin-Luther University Halle/Wittenberg with a thesis on the reintegration of Burkinabé labor migrants displaced from Côte d’Ivoire.
She is an associated member of the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle.