Marianne Scott

After a global career in diplomacy and non-profit leadership, Marianne Scott returned to her hometown of Washington, D.C. to begin her next career as a writer. She now lives across the street from her childhood home in Takoma D.C., one of the few neighborhoods that actively welcomed her biracial family back in 1968. She retired from the U.S. Department of State as a Minister Counselor of the Senior Foreign Service in late 2022. Fluent in Spanish, her 26-year diplomatic career included serving abroad as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Bolivia, and in public diplomacy positions in U.S. embassies in Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, Kenya, and elsewhere, as well as in policy roles domestically. Her guiding tenet, “The task of changing a hate-filled world belongs to each one of us,” comes from M. Pearl’s memoir A Mighty Heart, about the 2002 murder by Al Qaeda of her husband, journalist Danny Pearl. Marianne and Danny were friends while undergraduates together at Stanford University. After Danny’s death, Marianne helped the Pearl family establish the Daniel Pearl Foundation and spent several years as the foundation’s executive director. Marianne is the author of the League of Women Voters’ Citizen’s Guide to Global Economic Policymaking (2002) and multiple articles. She has served as the Chair of the Board of Humanities DC, her hometown’s affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a proud mother.