Marya Bangee

Biography

Marya Bangee is the Executive Director of Harness, an organization that works within Hollywood to center the narratives of marginalized communities in popular culture. Started by America Ferrera, Wilmer Valderrama, and Ryan Piers Williams, Harness envisions a world where human rights are protected by the power of the people through fostering collaborations between artists and activists and driving the conversation for social change within the entertainment industry.

Marya is passionate about helping build communities. She started her journey as a community organizer in the Muslim-American community, including leading a national advocacy campaign for the protection of free speech on college campuses. Through her organizing, she has often represented the Muslim-American voice in national media like the New York Times and NPR.

She served as a Project Director at UCLA, working to increase access to higher education in impoverished areas of the city. Seeing the need for communal solutions to the challenges posed by poverty, she completed a six-month residency with the Industrial Areas Foundation. There, Marya studied the works of Saul Alinsky and Marshall Ganz while helping organize a mayoral town hall with a thousand Angelenos and carrying out a series of mobile enrollment clinics for the Affordable Care Act with low-income communities.

Marya was selected for the prestigious Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs, where she worked on a national senate campaign, staffed California's Speaker of the Assembly, and helped develop part of the ten-year strategic plan for the California Community Foundation. Marya graduated as a Dean’s Merit Scholar from the University of Southern California (USC) with her Masters in Public Administration in 2015, specializing in nonprofit management and public policy. In 2017, she was selected by the Ford Foundation as a Public Voices Fellow, which aims to dramatically increase the impact of spokespeople from underrepresented communities.