Directors and Officers

Maureen Orth served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Medellin, Colombia in the sixties where she first helped build Escuela Marina Orth (please see www. K12Wired.com), the first public bilingual school in Colombia and the first One Laptop Per Child School there.

An experienced journalist, and the third woman writer of Newsweek, she has been a Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair since 1993. She started writing for the magazine in 1988. Among the heads of state she has interviewed are Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Argentine President Carlos Menem, and Irish President Mary Robinson.

She has also profiled controversial figures such Gerry Adams, Madonna, Mohammed Fayed, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Marc Rich, as well as fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld and Tina Turner.

Orth’s investigative story highlighting the role of Afghanistan’s illegal opium trade in funding terrorism written shortly after 9/11, has been lauded by the Office of Drug Control Policy. Her profile on murder suspect Andrew Cunanan for the September 1997 issue was the first in-depth report on the man who killed Versace. The article served as the basis for her best selling book, Vulgar Favors (Delacorte Press, 1999). Orth has also written investigative pieces regarding the allegations of sexual abuse by Michael Jackson and child abuse by Woody Allen, and has chronicled the zig- zagging career of Arianna Huffington. She is also the author of another book, "The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the scenes of the celebrity industrial complex."