Michele Pistone is founding faculty director of the Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Advocates (VIISTA) and of the Mother Cabrini Institute on Immigration
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A law professor at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law for 26 years, Pistone speaks and publishes regularly on migration and asylum law, access to justice, technology, and on topics related to legal education, including online and hybrid teaching, student-centered course design, and formative assessment. Pistone is leading Refugees and Migrants in Our Common Home , a global academic initiative responding to the urgent realities of migration and displacement, mobilizing a growing worldwide community of higher education partners, scholars, community organizations, educators, students, migrants and refugees for coordinated, long-term action. She is presently an expert advisor to the Holy See Mission to the United Nations on human rights and migration, a fellow at the Center for Migration Studies in New York, and a fellow at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. Pistone was also a Fulbright scholar at the University of Malta, where she helped to launch Malta’s first clinical education program in the law faculty. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio resident in March 2024.
At Villanova, she founded and directed the law school’s asylum law clinic from 1999-2018 and was awarded a 2019 J.M.K. Innovation Prize to launch VIISTA, the first-ever online university-based certificate program to train non-lawyers to become immigrant advocates and accredited representatives who can become DOJ authorized to provide legal representation to immigrants in immigration courts and before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
