Victoria Riskin, Ph.D. was a founding member of Human Rights Watch/California South and serves as its co-chair. Human Rights Watch, headquartered in New York, is the largest US-based human rights organization with a staff of nearly 250 working globally (HRW.org) and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace for its collaboration on treaty to ban landmines. She sits on the International Board of Human Rights Watch and helped create the Human Rights Watch Council comprised of leading citizens in twelve cities around the world. She serves as advisor to HRW's Asia Division and is Chair of the Hellman-Hammett Prize Committee, a grant program for writers who have been victims of political persecution. She has lectured on human rights, Buddhist psychology, on the Tibetan genocide, and has traveled extensively to refugee communities in India, Nepal, and Tibet for The Tibetan Aid Project, a non-profit foundation in Northern California. She is a member of the Pacific Council on International Relations.

After fifteen years in private practice as a psychologist, Riskin began her career in television and wrote and produced several award-winning television movies for television. She is past President of the Writers Guild of America, west where she was a leading voice against media concentration. Victoria has been given the Horace Mann Award by Antioch University for her dedication to public service, the Elizabeth Rose Bird Commitment to Justice Award by Death Penalty Focus and the Chairman's Award by the Caucus of Writers, Producers and Directors for her leadership in opposing media concentration and the Human Rights Award from the ACLU of Southern California.