Background
Koff, who is mixed-race and Jewish, was born in 1972 to a Tanzanian mother, Msindo Mwinyipembe, and an American father, David Koff, both documentary filmmakers focused on human rights issues.
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Clea Koff
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University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Career
She spent her childhood in England, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, and the United States. By the time she was a teenager she had decided to study human osteology, which she did first in California. She earned her bachelor"s degree in anthropology from Stanford University.
Koff went on to the master’s program in forensic anthropology at the University of Arizona.
She completed her masters degree in 1999 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, after combining her studies with working for the United Nations between 1996 and 2000. As a 23-year-old graduate student studying prehistoric skeletons in California, Koff joined a small team of United Nations scientists exhuming victims of the genocide in Rwanda.
Her job was to find evidence to bring the perpetrators to trial, and to help relatives to identify their loved ones. Koff founded in 2005 The (MPID), a non-profit organization, based in Los Angeles, which is about "essentially linking families with missing persons with the Coroner" General’ s Office which hold thousands of unidentified bodies".
The center closed in 2012.
