Her father was Sir Charles Villiers, a merchant banker, who was the first director of the International Reconstruction Corporation and chairman of British Steel Corporation from 1974 until 1988; her mother was Sir Charles's second wife, the former Countess Marie Josée de la Barre d’Erquelinnes[1] and wartime Belgian resistance fighter.
Her doctoral thesis became the basis for her first book, Seeking Peace in El Salvador: The Struggle to Reconstruct a Nation at the End of the Cold War (2001).
From there, she was invited to join the international affairs department at the Brookings Institution, where she wrote about Central American migration and edited both The End of Nostalgia: Mexico Confronts the Challenges of Global Competition (2013) and New Directions in Brazilian Foreign Relations.
On a voluntary basis, Diana Negroponte has supported environmental projects in Honduras, micro-enterprise lending in the Philippines, and Habitat for Humanity home-building in Mexico City and New York as well as feeding homeless populations in Washington D.C. She remains a trustee emeritus of Freedom House, emeritus board member of Habitat for Humanity's New York City chapter, chair of the Wilson Council at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and member of the Women's Foreign Policy Group and serves on the Advisory Board of the School of Global Policy & Strategy at University of California, San Diego.
She has appeared on CNN, NBC, C-SPAN Washington Journal,[3] and PBS Newshour[4] and has written articles for national periodicals.