Eric Garcetti is a committed public servant, educator, and diplomat. He was confirmed in a bipartisan vote as the 26th United States Ambassador to the Republic of India on March 15, 2023.
After serving twelve years as a Los Angeles city councilmember, including six as City Council President, Garcetti was elected as the 42nd Mayor of the City of Los Angeles in 2013 as the youngest mayor in Los Angeles history, and he was re-elected in 2017 with the widest margin ever recorded in his city.
During his mayoralty, Garcetti led Los Angeles through crisis, charted a bold green future, and launched record investments in infrastructure. Under his watch, Los Angeles was named the best run city in America by the What Works Cities initiative of Bloomberg Philanthropies and Garcetti was named Public Official of the Year in 2019 by Governing Magazine. Garcetti oversaw a period of record economic growth and opportunity, won the Olympic and Paralympic Games for Los Angeles in 2028 and left the city with a record budget surplus. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Garcetti was praised for leading Los Angeles’ aggressive response, building the largest testing and vaccination sites in the world and adopting many of the earliest public health protections while keeping critical sectors of the economy going.
While Mayor, Garcetti was elected by his global peers to serve as Chair of C40 Cities – a network of 97 of the world’s biggest cities taking bold climate action. At COP26 in Glasgow, he represented the world’s urban leaders delivering the Cities Race to Zero pledge, a commitment of over 1,000 global cities to implement net-zero carbon futures.
Garcetti served as a naval officer in the reserve component for 12 years and was selected as Rockefeller Next Generation Leadership Fellow, an inaugural Asia 21 Fellow of the Asia Society, a Young Fellow of the French-American Foundation, a Rodel Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and a Reboot Fellow. In 2005, he was awarded the New Frontier Award given each year by the Kennedy family and Kennedy Library to a young elected official who embodies President Kennedy’s vision of service.
Garcetti earned a B.A. at Columbia College, Columbia University as a John Jay Scholar and his roommate’s father, William Clark, was a predecessor of his as U.S. Ambassador to India. Ambassador Garcetti studied Hindi and Indian culture and history while at Columbia and went on to earn a Master’s degree at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. After graduating, Ambassador Garcetti was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, studying at The Queen’s College, Oxford and the London School of Economics and Political Science. While in England, he met his now-wife Amy Elaine Wakeland, who was a fellow member of his Rhodes Scholar class. They have one daughter and have been foster parents for more than a decade.
A fourth-generation native of Los Angeles, Garcetti is a proud card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild and is an avid pianist and photographer.
Read Ambassador-Designate Garcetti’s bio in Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil here.
