Mary Kalantzis

In 1998, Kalantzis was one of the founders of the Unity Party, created to oppose the anti-immigration politics of Pauline Hanson and One Nation.

Mary Kalantzis was born in a village in the Peloponnese, Greece, and migrated to Australia with her family in 1953. She was the eldest of three children, to Nicholas and Diamondo. In 1982 she was the recipient of a Commonwealth Postgraduate Research Award, and in 1990-91 she was a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Keene State College of the University System of New Hampshire in the United States. She has since held (in reverse chronological order) appointments as dean of the Faculty of Education, Language and Community Services at RMIT University, director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at James Cook University of North Queensland, director of the Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture at the University of Technology, Sydney and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Multicultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. While serving as Dean at RMIT University she was elected president of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. Her service activities include being a board member of Teaching Australia, belonging to The National Institute for Quality Teaching and School Leadership, appointment as a commissioner of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, chair of the Queensland Ethnic Affairs Ministerial Advisory Committee, vice president of the National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia and a member of the Australia Council's Community Cultural Development Board.

Professor Mary Kalantzis (born 1949) is an Australian author and academic, and is a former dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in the United States. Her work examines Australian multiculturalism.