Mary Ellen Giess

Mary Ellen Giess is chief program officer at Interfaith America overseeing strategy, alignment, and integration across IA’s programming. She has served in various roles during her 15 years at IA, recently overseeing innovation areas including IA’s democracy and policy initiatives, business consulting, and faith and health efforts. Mary Ellen manages high-profile partnerships for IA, including collaborations with the Obama administration on the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge, IA’s higher education research partnership IDEALS, and most recently Team Up, a national collaborative with YMCA of the USA, Habitat for Humanity International, and Catholic Charities USA.

Mary Ellen is the co-editor of Educating About Religious Diversity and Interfaith Engagement: A Handbook for Student Affairs (2019) and the author of numerous articles, including publications in The Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

She holds degrees from Harvard Divinity School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mary Ellen’s on-campus experiences and Unitarian Universalist values inspire her work at IA.

Outside of work, she can be found browsing cookbooks and navigating the agony and the ecstasy of parenting three daughters.