Nino Lezhava

Nino Lezhava is an Associate Partner at Elevate Consulting Group and the Executive Director of Elevate Crossroads, a South Caucasus and the Black Sea–focused advisory platform that provides geopolitical risk analysis, foresight, and strategic intelligence to public and private ventures. Since 2024, she is a Non-Resident Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

Nino Lezhava is a NATO-trained professional with more than a decade of experience in defense and security planning, policy-making, and strategic analysis. She specializes in Black Sea and the South Caucasus security, transatlantic relations, and global geopolitical competition. Currently, her research examines implications of China’s geoeconomic coercion and partnerships its these regions. 

Previously, she contributed to national security policy-making, defense transformation, and security sector oversight while fostering  Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration through different postings at the General Staff of the Georgian Defense Forces, the Parliament of Georgia, and NATO Headquarters.

She lectures at German and Georgian universities, teaching masters-level courses on national security and transatlantic relations, and publishes regularly with CEPA, New Eastern Europe, and other leading outlets. 

Nino holds a master’s degree in International and European Security from the University of Geneva, an MPA from the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer, and a BA in International Relations from Tbilisi State University.