Sara Minkara is a former Ambassador-level U.S. diplomat, global strategist, board director, and trusted advisor to Fortune 500 executives, corporate boards, and senior government leaders navigating geopolitical complexity, growth, and change.

Sara’s expertise spans geopolitical risk, global market strategy, artificial intelligence and technology governance, workforce and human capital strategy, stakeholder engagement, and disability inclusion. She helps organizations strengthen resilience, navigate complexity, identify growth opportunities in underleveraged markets (including the disability economy), and build trusted relationships that enable market access across the Middle East and broader Muslim world.

Appointed by President Biden as U.S. Special Advisor on International Disability Rights, Sara led U.S. foreign policy on disability across more than 70 countries and developed the Disability Foreign Policy Playbook, a first-of-its-kind framework adopted across embassies, bureaus, and senior leadership. She expanded disability policy into strategic domains where it had historically been absent — artificial intelligence, trade, economic development, peace and security, and digital transformation.

Sara has built coalitions and driven strategic initiatives across ASEAN, APEC, NATO, the Munich Security Conference, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and led the U.S. Delegation to the inaugural G7 Inclusion and Disability Ministerial Meeting — navigating competing interests, influencing senior decision-makers, and advancing consensus on complex global challenges.

Through her independent advisory practice, Sara works with public- and private-sector leaders to strengthen governance, accelerate growth, and embed disability into enterprise strategy, operations, workforce development, and emerging technologies.

Sara is the founder and principal of In the Dark, a high-impact experiential methodology deployed across corporations, governments, and institutions to unlock employee potential, strengthen collaboration, and surface innovative thinking. Using a blindfold as a deliberate leadership tool, the program eliminates visual bias, titles, and habitual power dynamics — the noise that obscures how people truly relate, communicate, and contribute. In the absence of familiar cues, participants listen more carefully, speak with greater intention, and engage more authentically. The result is deeper trust, stronger team cohesion, and the kind of clarity that traditional meetings and workshops cannot produce. It is a strategic tool for leaders who want more effective teams, higher engagement, and lasting organizational change.

She developed and teaches the first university course on Disability and Diplomacy at Georgetown University, and previously founded Empowerment Through Integration, a nonprofit advancing educational and economic opportunities for youth with disabilities across the Middle East and North Africa.

Sara also serves on boards, providing strategic guidance on governance, long-term value creation, stakeholder trust, and organizational effectiveness. She currently serves on the board of the Center for Independent Living, a pioneering organization that has helped shape the independent living movement and advance the rights, inclusion, and leadership of people with disabilities.

A graduate of Wellesley College and the Harvard Kennedy School, Sara is a member of the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders community. Her leadership has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30.