Mary Riner

Mary Riner discovered that “still, small voice within” in her first yoga class 35 years ago, and is a dedicated student of Sri Dharma Mittra, a realized living master who has been teaching classical hatha raja yoga in New York City for over 60 years. She is a RYT500 and is fulfilling the requirements for the Dharma Yoga 800-hour “Life of a  Yogi” teacher-training program. 

At ACB Ideas, Mary serves as Chief of External Relations and manages new business development for the company. She founded her first non-profit in her early 20s while she was in graduate school studying ancient Greek philosophy. She then went on to build and run a national marketing campaign for a major think tank to mobilize public pressure on behalf of better education for the poor. 

When her own children became school aged, Mary got active in local efforts, turning around her neighborhood public school and leading a grassroots-to-grasstops campaign to bring the highest performing charter school network in the nation to DC. 

She graduated from Washington College with a BA in Humanities, studied art history and Latin at The University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and finished her coursework for her PhD in philosophy at The Catholic University of America. She is the founder of three non-profits. She lives in Washington DC and Maine and has three children.