Peggy Knudson

Peggy Knudson is Senior Director of Advancement at Meridian International Center in Washington, DC. Meridian is a nonpartisan organization that works to promote global leadership through the exchange of ideas, people, and culture.

Peggy has nearly three decades of experience in fundraising and nonprofit management. Since 2000, she has led teams that raised more than $300 million from individuals, foundations, corporations, and governments for nonprofits working on a variety of issues — public policy, foreign policy, advocacy, international security, global health, and climate change, among others. 

Peggy started her career at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where she was promoted to Acting Director of the Fund’s Berlin office in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has also been executive director of Women In International Security, an organization dedicated to promoting women as decision-makers in foreign and defense affairs, and a marketing manager at the Treuhandanstalt, the German government agency that restructured and sold formerly state-owned East German companies in the 1990s.

Peggy has an M.A. in European Studies and Economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a B.A. summa cum laude in Journalism and English from the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. She is fluent in German.

In her spare time, Peggy loves to kayak near her family’s cabin on the Cacapon River, in West Virginia, and bike along the Potomac near her residences in Brunswick, Maryland, and Washington, DC.  She is also constantly striving to improve her modest piano, guitar, and ukulele skills.