Samantha Power was born in Dublin and raised in Ireland until she was nine, when her mother emigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
She subsequently graduated from Yale University and from Harvard Law School. In 1993, at age 23, she became a U.S. citizen.
From 1998 to 2002, she served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she later became the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy.
She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Clinton as "a monster."
Power joined the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008. She served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council from January 2009 to February 2013.
She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide.
Barnard College awarded Power its highest award, the 2015 Barnard Medal of Distinction.
The 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize was awarded on June 8, 2016 to Ambassador Samantha Power serving as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
Samantha Power is considered to have been a key figure in the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya.
Power served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017.