Mary Orsak

Biography

Mary Orsak is majoring in Russian at Yale University, and hopes to pursue an MPhil in Slavonic Studies at Oxford. At Yale, her senior thesis focuses on Czech and Soviet performance artists in the 1960s and 1970s. She has also completed research on Soviet control of Orthodox icons, Russian hackers, and Václav Havel’s plays. She was the former co-director of Walden Peer Counseling, which provides anonymous peer guidance to Yale undergraduates, and served on the Yale Police Department’s Advisory Committee on Community Policing. In her hometown of Dallas, Orsak founded and served as president of Story Power, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of young girls through the donation of books written about and by inspiring women. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a Yale junior.