artist · writing politics

Marissa Ng is a writer and artist studying democracy, identity politics, and polarization at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is pursuing a Master of Public Administration on a full scholarship. Her work explores the social justice dimensions of gender, race, sexuality, migration, and the environment. Through writing and public narrative, she seeks to help build a politics of plurality and a civic imagination in which people of different identities can see themselves as part of a shared public life.

As a Transition Term Fellow, she will support Mayor-elect Sharon Owens, Syracuse’s first Black mayor. At the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, she leads a public narrative project on the Arctic as a political mirror for the United States, supervised by Ambassador David Balton. At Harvard, she studies poetry and serves on the Kennedy School Student Government and Harvard Graduate Council.

Previously, Marissa led forest and coastal conservation strategies in East Africa and Canada, and advised on decarbonization projects as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Her work has taken her from the Mpingo forests of Tanzania to the coastal waters of her home in British Columbia, where she supported Indigenous-led stewardship in the Great Bear Rainforest through The Nature Conservancy.

Marissa holds an MBA and an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management from the University of Oxford, where she was an Oxford–Pershing Square Scholar. She graduated with honours from the University of British Columbia and studied at Sciences Po Paris.

Originally from Canada, she is now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has lived in China, Ethiopia, France, and the United Kingdom. She speaks conversational French and broken Mandarin.