Senior Fellow at the Bard College's Center for Civic Engagement where he is directing the Project on Culture and Civic Engagement which navigates the spaces where politics and culture meet. Prior to joining Bard, he worked at the Open Society Foundations, holding a variety of senior leadership roles.

He joined Open Society in 1988 and established more than 20 of the foundations in the Open Society Foundations network throughout Eurasia, the Middle East, and South Asia. He also developed and led programs and organizations such as the Central Eurasia Project, Eurasianet, and Revenue Watch and led Open Society's work backing the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and other significant culture and arts programming. He previously was regional director of the Middle East North Africa and Southwest Asia and headed Open Society's work in the former Soviet Union. Richter was founding chairman of the Revenue Watch Institute, and served on the boards of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and the Open Government Partnership. He has written for The New York Times, the World Policy Journal, and other publications. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). 

The working title of his research project is "A Ukrainian Family Chronicle Through War and Resistance." His Research interests include memory studies, Holocaust studies, history of the UPA/OUN, war memorials, and Ukraine from the 1920s to the 1950s. The goals for Richter's residency at the Center for Urban History are to conduct interviews, to conduct research and organize future research activities, to study historiography and methodology, and hone his knowledge of the Ukrainian language.