Walker Lambert was born in 1978 in Washington, DC. His father, David Patterson Lambert, a native of Arkansas, was an internationally known expert on the problems of global poverty and hunger who served as counselor to the U.S. mission to the United Nations and advised many government agencies. His mother, Diana Rich, who holds a doctorate in political science, worked for the U.S. Congress and NASA, and later as a university professor.

 

Walker spent his childhood in Washington and his summers with extended family in Arkansas or with his younger brother, Taylor, at the beach in Delaware. He devoted himself to theater and football in high school and went on to study English literature at the University of Chicago. In a class on Shakespeare, he met his future wife, Eleanore (Nelly) Lewis. Walker acted for a brief time, including at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre; he also studied and lived in Italy during and after completing his B.A. at Chicago. He has master’s degrees in business and communications from Johns Hopkins University.  

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Walker’s professional life became centered on documentary film and educational media programming. For the last ten years, as cofounder and managing director of an educational media firm, he traveled extensively in Africa, Asia, and the United States, making films and designing media programs on a wide variety of topics, including agriculture and nutrition, national security, American history, education and storytelling. His clients included large multinational non-profits, U.S. government agencies, and universities. This work garnered various awards and recognitions, including, in 2019, the “Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award” from Iowa State University’s Seed Science Center. 

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Walker learned of Meher Baba in high school and read Meher Baba’s Discourses shortly after graduating. Several years later, in 2005, as he was beginning his professional life in Washington, DC, he and his wife, Nelly, met Murshida Carol Conner. In 2010, she invited them to live at Sufism’s Washington Center, where in 2016 their son was born. 

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Murshida Conner appointed Walker her successor in January of 2023, and on her passing in April 2023 he assumed the role of murshid of Sufism Reoriented.