Leonard Noisette is the director of U.S. Programs' Criminal Justice Fund at the Open Society Institute. In this role, Noisette works to improve the administration of criminal justice and decrease the country’s over-reliance on mass incarceration and harsh punishment.

Noisette has spent his entire professional career working in the criminal justice arena. For the last fifteen years, he was the executive director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS), a position that he has held since shortly after NDS's creation in 1990. In this position, Noisette was involved in local, statewide, and national discussions about how best to meet the many daunting challenges of our often failing criminal justice system.

Noisette has litigated criminal matters at both the trial and appellate level and trained and supervised young lawyers; he sits on the board of the New York State Defenders Association and is currently chair of the board of the National Legal Aid & Defender Association. Recently, he served on a special committee of the New York State Bar Association charged with examining the collateral consequences of criminal proceedings.