Brief Professional Biography

Clea is a forensic anthropologist and author. She was a member of the  first international forensic team brought together by the United Nations  to investigate evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity,  commencing in Rwanda in 1996.  She subsequently participated in missions  in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, where she was Deputy Chief  Anthropologist of the UN International Criminal Tribunal Morgue in  2000. 

The Bone Woman,  Clea’s memoir of her experiences working for the war crimes tribunals,  was published by Random House in 2004 and has been translated into nine languages and published in fourteen countries.  Among other  honors, The Bone Woman was awarded the Nancy (France) Human Rights Book Prize, was a National Public Radio Best, a Discover Magazine Top 20 Science Book, and an Editor's Pick of the Foreign Policy Association. 

Clea  went on to co-coordinate the Anthropology Laboratory of the UN  Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus and she founded the non-profit  Missing Persons Identification Resource Center to develop forensic  profiles of missing persons designed to address the backlog of tens of  thousands of unidentified bodies in the US.  

Clea holds a BA from  Stanford University, an MA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and  trained with Dr. Walt Birkby while a Master's student in the graduate  forensic anthropology program at the University of Arizona. She now  writes fiction. Her first mystery novel, Freezing, was published in 2011 with worldwide English rights going to Severn House Publishers. Freezing was published in French by Éditions Héloïse d’Ormesson in 2012 and was nominated for French ELLE's Prix des Lectrices. 

SURFACING, Clea's new novel featuring Jayne Hall and Steelie Lander of Agency 32/1, is coming soon in French from Éditions Héloïse d’Ormesson.

Audiovisual rights to SURFACING have been sold to PatMa Productions.

Author portrait  © David Ignaszewski