Megan Beyer

MEGAN BEYER is a journalist, activist, and life-long advocate of women’s rights and cultural diplomacy.

Ms. Beyer is a national and international speaker on women's rights and gender in the economy. Among hundreds of speaking engagements, she has presented at the White House Summit on Working Families (2013), the United Nations UNWomen conference (2013), a Geena Davis Institute for Gender in the Media panel on Women in Film (2014), and moderated a United States Institute of Peace panel discussion on gender roles in the Middle East (2016). Among her many media roles, Ms. Beyer hosted PBS The Business Channel, is a regular panelist on PBS To the Contrary and formerly worked as a reporter for Channel 8 News, CBS affiliate WTVR in Richmond, VA. She was a regular columnist for Tamedia's in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 2015, Ms. Beyer was appointed by President Barack Obama to be Executive Director of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. In this role, she led the first official U.S. Cultural Delegation to Cuba in 2016, which included directors of four U.S. cultural agencies and artists Usher, Joshua Bell, Alfre Woodard, Lourdes Lopez, Kal Penn, Smokey Robinson, and Dave Matthews. During her tenure, the Committee partnered with the White House to host “South by South Lawn."

Ms. Beyer is founder and chair of the Sister Republics bilateral women’s leadership initiative with the US Embassy in Bern, Switzerland and serves on the global advisory council of the non-profit EDGE Foundation board in Zug, Switzerland. She is on the board of the Wilson Center’s Women in Public Service Project and Meridian International.

Ms. Beyer served as the External Relations Representative for the Swiss-based company EDGE Gender Certification from 2013-2015. The company a certifies companies and international organizations achieving a global standard of gender certification. The World Bank and International Development Bank are EDGE Certified.

Ms. Beyer began her career as a reporter covering education and politics for local and national television news programs. She was a regular contributor to Tamedia newspapers in Switzerland from 2010-2013 and in the US, and her essays are found on Motherhood Movement Online, Role Re-Boot, the Alexandria Times, and the Huffington Post. For the last 15 years she has been a regular panelist on To the Contrary, a women's political talk show on public television stations nationwide. In 1991 she won the Associated Press Award in Virginia for best feature reporting. She was nominated for a Washington DC Emmy the same year.

Over the last 25 years, she has served on over a dozen of national, state and local boards including WETA-DC's public television station, the national board of Reading is Fundamental, and Virginia NARAL. She was Finance Chairman of the Virginia Community College System, a Chair of the Women’s Leadership Forum at the Democratic National Committee, and the finance Chairman for the Mid Atlantic “Women for Obama.” In 2018, Governor Ralph Northam appointed Ms. Beyer to the Virginia Humanities Board. She currently serves on the Wilson Center’s Women in Public Service Project, the EDGE Foundation and is a trustee of the To the Contrary board of directors. She is also a member of the advisory group at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and the advisory board of the online company Quotabelle. She is a member of the International Women’s Forum in Washington DC.

Follow Ms. Beyer on Twitter @carrollbeyer