Maryana Iskander has built a wide-ranging global career around two core values: the desire to break down systemic barriers to opportunity, and an interest in forging solutions through collaboration. In the twenty years since she graduated from Yale Law School, Iskander has let those principles guide her to roles in higher education administration (as advisor to the president of Rice University), women’s health (as chief operating officer of Planned Parenthood), and youth unemployment (as chief executive officer of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, a social enterprise based in South Africa and Rwanda). “If I think about all the jobs that I’ve had,” Iskander reflects, “the overarching question has been: What do you devote your time and talents to that will make the world a fairer and better place for others?”
Today, as chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, Iskander is at the helm of the non-profit behind Wikipedia, one of the world’s top five websites. (More than 1.5 billion unique devices visit Wikipedia and its parent foundation’s sites every month.) The ubiquitous online encyclopedia relies on a staff of over 700 across more than fifty countries, supporting a corps of over 250,000 volunteers who contribute content and edit in 300-plus languages. Since starting as Wikimedia’s CEO in early 2022, Iskander is developing a strategic plan for the organization, leading a recalibration of its values, and advancing the work of volunteer communities around the world. For Iskander and her colleagues, the stakes could not be higher: Wikipedia has been called “the last best place left on the internet,” a bulwark against misinformation and disinformation—an enterprise driven by a public mission, as she describes it, “to increase the veracity and capacity of human knowledge.”
It was the pursuit of knowledge, a love of “learning and education for its own sake,” that brought Iskander to New Haven to pursue her J.D. through the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Already several years removed from her bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude in sociology from Rice University, where she was a Harry S. Truman Scholar), she had been a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford and a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company. At Yale Law School, she was a member of the first slight-majority female class, a milestone that inspired Iskander and her colleagues to undertake a comprehensive research effort to illuminate the experiences of their generation of women law students; that project ultimately would lead to the publication, in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, of Iskander’s 2006 article (co-authored with Sari Bashi ’97 B.A., ’03 J.D.), “Why Legal Education is Failing Women.” Drawn to the intersection of theory and practice, she volunteered with the school’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, representing female prisoners and low-income tenants and providing legal assistance to local non-profits. Upon graduation, she completed a judicial clerkship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Iskander is a member of the board of Co-Impact, a global philanthropic collaborative; the Henry Crown Fellowship at the Aspen Institute; and, at Yale, the President’s Council on International Activities, engaging in efforts to expand access to a Yale education for students from across the African continent. She has served on the U.S. board of directors for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. For her leadership and service, she has been recognized with the Rice University Distinguished Alumni Award (2020) and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2019). In 2018, accompanied by both of her parents, she returned to Yale’s campus to receive the Yale Law Women Alumni Achievement Award and share her perspective with current law students—an experience that ranks among her most cherished memories as an alumna.
Iskander, who divides her time between the United States, where Wikimedia is headquartered, and her home in South Africa, is the aunt of two nephews, Maximus Iskander Porter and Roman Hawkins Iskander Porter.