Chris Livaccari | 李克立, Head of School

Christopher M. Livaccari is the Head of Presidio Knolls School (PKS) in San Francisco, and an educator, author, and former U.S. diplomat who served in Tokyo and Shanghai as a Vice Consul, Deputy Press Attaché, and as Deputy Director of the Tokyo American Center. He was previously Director of Education and Senior Advisor in the Center for Global Education at Asia Society in New York. 

In 2025, Chris received the Salomon Prize for Global Educator of the Year from the Institute for Global Learning, a collaborative consortium of more than 400 schools in 23 countries that promote international exchange and partnership, and advance their students’ global and intercultural competencies. He was recognized for “his continued commitment to innovation in both multilingual education and educational partnerships between the U.S. and China” and for his leadership of PKS “from a startup into a thriving model of inquiry-based, multilingual education.”

In 2022, Chris received a Kellogg Foundation grant, in recognition of his work “building understanding and leadership in US-China relations, and helping educate the next generation of US-China leadership.” He has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, has spoken on global education at the British Museum in London, and was the recipient of the U.S. State Department’s Meritorious Honor Award, citing outstanding speeches written for two U.S. ambassadors to Japan. 

Chris is the author of New Ways of Seeing: How Multilingualism Opens Our Eyes and Trains Our Minds for a Complex World, and co-author of Structures of Mandarin Chinese for Speakers of English I & II, Chinese Language Learning in the Early Grades, and the Chinese for Tomorrow series, among many essays and articles on language, history, education, and culture. 

As a Foreign Service Officer, Chris supported visits to Asia by two U.S. presidents, two secretaries of state, and multiple congressional delegations. As Director of Education and Chinese Language Initiatives at Asia Society, he created a partnership and exchange network of more than 200 schools across 28 U.S. states and 23 provinces in China that included almost 100,000 students. 

He was previously the Chinese Program Director at Silicon Valley International School in Palo Alto, California, and a member of the board of trustees of Chinese American International School in San Francisco. He is an Honorary Lifetime Member of the Chinese Language Teachers Association of Greater New York, in recognition of his more than two decades of service to the field. 

Chris studied modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, & Russian literature at Columbia University; Classical Chinese, Japanese, Korean, & Sanskrit literature at the University of Chicago; and applied linguistics at New York University.