Maya Soetoro-Ng

Maya Soetoro-Ng

Maya Kasandra Soetoro-Ng is the Indonesian-American maternal half-sister of the 44th U.S. president, Barack Obama. She is currently a consultant for the Obama Foundation, working to develop the Asia-Pacific Leaders Program. In 2019, she and Todd Shuster and Jennifer Gates cofounded The Peace Studio: a non-profit organization whose mission is to support, train and inspire people everywhere to become active peacebuilders.

About Maya Soetoro-Ng in brief

Summary Maya Soetoro-NgMaya Kasandra Soetoro-Ng is the Indonesian-American maternal half-sister of the 44th U.S. president, Barack Obama. She is currently a consultant for the Obama Foundation, working to develop the Asia-Pacific Leaders Program, and a faculty specialist at the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace & Conflict Resolution. She authored a children’s book, Ladder to the Moon, that was inspired by her mother and her daughter, Suhaila; it was published in 2011. In 2019, she and Todd Shuster and Jennifer Gates cofounded The Peace Studio: a non-profit organization whose mission is to support, train and inspire people everywhere to become active peacebuilders.

She has also written a book about peace education and a young adult novel entitled Yellowood. She was a high school history teacher at La Pietra: Hawaii School for Girls and the Education Laboratory School, both in Honolulu, Hawaii. She previously taught and developed curriculum at The Learning Project, an alternative public middle school in New York City, from 1996 to 2000. In 2006, she received a Ph. D. in international comparative education from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.