Marin Lessenski

Marin Lessenski is Program Director of the European Policies Program of the Open Society Institute – Sofia (OSIS). He holds an MA in Southeast European Studies from the Central European University – Budapest and an MA in History from the University of Sofia. Mr. Lessenski previously worked for the Institute for Regional and International Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria. He has been a Freedom House Visiting Fellow with the Hudson Institute in the US and a participant in the Transatlantic Young Leaders Program of the Aspen Institute – Berlin.

At OSI-Sofia he is the main author of the Media Literacy Index, which assesses the resilience potential to disinformation in a selected number of European countries, using indicators for media freedom, education and trust in people.

Mr. Lessenski is responsible and the main author of the ‘Catch-Up Index’, which measures the convergence or divergence of European countries along key economy, democracy, governance, and quality of life indicators, with a focus on central and eastern Europe.

Mr. Lessenski is also managing the OSIS Think Tanks for the Future of EU Enlargement, an initiative for contributing to keeping alive and further fine-tuning strategies of EU enlargement towards the Western Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia through supporting and cooperating with think tanks in the EU candidate countries and EU member states.