Sana Bardawil

Sana Bardawil is an experienced international corporate affairs professional and board member with a passion for education, art and cultural heritage preservation through storytelling with a keen interest in leveraging digitisation to extend the reach to all.

Sana has been a member of the organising team of the International Friends of the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague since 2021, which provides monthly lectures by curators, art historians and authors, and is the leading English language programme of its kind amongst the major cultural institutions in The Netherlands.

She worked as a UK-based journalist for ten years for broadcast organisations, (the European Business News, later Dow Jones and the BBC) then was the Communication Advisor to the Delegation of the European Union to Lebanon for a year, before returning to the UK and joining Shell, where she worked for seventeen years, based in different countries. She led a team of 50 Communications professionals, as the General Manager, External Relations, Middle East and North Africa & Upstream Joint Ventures. She was part of both functional and business leadership teams and worked closely with counterparts from the joint ventures in many countries. Developing and delivering a large portfolio of social investment initiatives, in cooperation with government organisations, the private sector, civic society, in the areas of education and capacity-building was part of her role, as was managing emerging issues and crises and a deep understanding of the external historical, social, economic, educational and business contexts.

Sana was the Co-Chair and Board Member of the Arab International Women’s Forum (AIWF), a not-
for-profit UK-registered organisation focused on professional women and remains an Honorary Committee Member of the International Business Women’s Group (IBWG-Abu Dhabi). She is a Board Member in Disaster Tech Lab, a Netherlands-based not-for-profit providing technical support to countries affected by natural disasters and conflict. Sana provides intercultural awareness training on MENA to senior diplomats and businesses and is the Ambassador for the United World College Maastricht’s Female Empowerment Network. She is a mentor in WiSER (Women in Sustainability, Environment and Renewable Energy).

Sana completed a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the American University of Beirut, then graduated from St Antony’s College, Oxford University, with an M. Phil in Modern Middle East Studies and completed a Master’s degree in History of the Book and Digital Media from Leiden University with research for her thesis focused on the use of digitisation in preserving cultural heritage in Lebanon.