Mariam C. Said was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and currently resides in New York City. Together with Daniel Barenboim, she is a major force behind the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO) and serves as the Vice-President of the Barenboim-Said Foundation (USA). The WEDO was co-founded in 1999 by her late husband, literary critic and public intellectual Edward W. Said, and the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.
In 2009, Mrs. Said published the critically acclaimed memoir A World I Loved: A Story of an Arab Woman, by her mother Wadad Makdisi Cortas. She previously worked for more than 20 years in the financial services industry in New York.
Mrs. Said serves on the boards of a number of cultural organizations including The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine, and ArteEast, an international non-profit organization that supports and promotes artists from the Middle East and its diasporas. She is a founding member of the board of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and served on the Board of the Alumni Association of North America of the American University of Beirut. She is also an active participant in Senza Frontiere (Without Borders), a group that evaluates and recommends films for their summer film festival in Italy.
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