Trita Parsi, born on July 21, 1974, in Ahvaz, Iran, moved with his family to Sweden a year before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. He attended Barnsville High School in Ohio as an exchange student, graduating in 1992, before returning to Sweden. Parsi holds dual citizenship in Iran and Sweden and is a lawful permanent resident in the United States without pursuing citizenship. He is fluent in Persian/Farsi, English, and Swedish. Married to Amina Semlali, a Swedish-Moroccan human development specialist and former World Bank employee focused on behavioral economics, they have three children.

Early in his career, Parsi worked briefly at the Swedish communications firm Kreab and then for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York, serving on the Security Council for Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan, and Western Sahara, and on the General Assembly's Third Committee addressing human rights in Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Iraq. He later served as an adjunct professor at institutions including Johns Hopkins SAIS, NYU, Georgetown, and George Washington University, and as a policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Parsi is the founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), where he was a prominent advocate for U.S.-Iran diplomacy and critic of sanctions and military action against Iran. He is also co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an organization advocating restraint in U.S. foreign policy. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including 'Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States' (2007, silver medal Arthur Ross Book Award) and 'Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy' (2017). His work earned him the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and he has been named by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the top 25 most influential voices on foreign policy in Washington, DC, since 2021.

Parsi maintains a personal website at https://tritaparsi.com and is active on social media, including X/Twitter (@tparsi) and LinkedIn. He has faced significant criticism and allegations from Iranian-American groups and others, who accuse him of being an unregistered lobbyist for the Islamic Republic of Iran, maintaining close ties to regime-linked entities, distributing Iranian government documents to influence U.S. policy, opposing regime change, and acting as a 'regime apologist.' He sued critic Seid Hassan Daioleslam for defamation in 2009 (Trita Parsi v. Daioleslam) and has an adversarial relationship with David Schenker, whom he is accused of defaming.