Nadia I. Shihata

Commissioner

Nadia I. Shihata was nominated by Mayor Mamdani to serve as the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation and in April 2026 was confirmed by the New York City Council. She leads one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the country and is the first woman of color to hold this role.

Commissioner Shihata has spent most of her legal career in public service. For over 11 years, Commissioner Shihata served as a federal prosecutor at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, where she held several senior leadership roles. As Chief of the Organized Crime and Gangs Section, she supervised complex racketeering and violent crime investigations and prosecutions involving members and associates of transnational criminal organizations, street gangs, and La Cosa Nostra. In addition, as Deputy Chief of the Public Integrity Section, Commissioner Shihata supervised public corruption investigations and prosecutions involving bribery, fraud, theft of government funds, money laundering, and drug trafficking by correctional officers.

During her tenure as a federal prosecutor, Commissioner Shihata also personally led and handled numerous investigations involving civil rights violations, sexual abuse, extortion, public corruption, racketeering and violent crime, including murder. Among other notable cases, she led the groundbreaking investigation and prosecution of R&B musician Robert Sylvester Kelly, also known as “R Kelly,” who was convicted after a six-week trial in the Eastern District of New York of racketeering and related offenses and sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment. This was the first time Kelly was held criminally accountable for his conduct after decades of allegations and abuse. Commissioner Shihata also led an extensive investigation of sexual abuse of female inmates by federal correctional officers at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, as well as the investigation and prosecution of an active-duty NYPD officer and his co-conspirators for their involvement in a violent extortion scheme targeting small business owners in an immigrant community in Astoria, Queens.

In 2022, Commissioner Shihata left the United States Attorney’s Office to co-found a women-owned boutique law firm in New York City focused on civil rights and sexual misconduct matters, internal investigations, wrongful convictions and criminal defense.

Prior to becoming a federal prosecutor, Commissioner Shihata served as Appeals Counsel in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, and worked as a litigation associate at two large international law firms. From 2003-2004, Commissioner Shihata served as a law clerk to the Honorable T.S. Ellis, III, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Commissioner Shihata graduated from the University of Michigan Law School magna cum laude and Order of the Coif, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Law Review and received the Henry M. Bates Memorial Scholarship, the law school’s highest honor. She also holds an LLM in International Legal Studies from New York University School of Law and a B.A. from Tufts University.