Susan Falatko

Chargé d’Affaires ad interim of the United States to Bulgaria

A member of the Senior Foreign Service, Susan Falatko is a career Foreign Service Officer with twenty-six years of experience with the U.S. Department of State. She is currently serving as Chargé d’Affaires ad interim at the U.S. Embassy Sofia.

She most recently served as the Diplomat in Residence for the Midwest, based at the University of Illinois Chicago, responsible for recruiting talented individuals from across Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota for U.S. Department of State career and student program opportunities.

Prior to serving as a Diplomat in Residence, Ms. Falatko was Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) at the U.S. Embassy Ljubljana, serving as Chargé d’Affaires for over a year. She served as the Director of the Office of South Central European Affairs at the U.S. Department of State from 2017 to 2019, focusing on the Western Balkans. Prior to that, she was DCM at the U.S. Embassy to Mauritius and Seychelles from 2013 to 2016.

An Economic Officer in the Foreign Service since 1999, she has also served in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (2006-2009); Havana, Cuba (2001-2003); and Bamako, Mali (1999-2001). From 2003 to 2005, she worked on economic, counter-terrorism, and Western Balkans issues on the OSCE desk in the European Bureau’s Office for Regional Political-Military Affairs. Ms. Falatko has also been posted to Kigali, Rwanda, as the Public Affairs Officer and to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva as the U.S. liaison to the UN Specialized Agencies.

Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Ms. Falatko received a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Iowa (1990), an M.A. in International Relations from the George Washington University (1997) and a Master’s Degree in National Resource Strategy from the Eisenhower School at the National Defense University (2017).