Myra Awodey

Myra Awodey is the Senior Community Manager at Duolingo, a Pittsburgh-based language learning app, whose mission it is to make language learning free and accessible to everyone. She holds a BA in Germanic Literature and a BS in Environmental Sciences from the University of Chicago. Myra has studied evolution in birds, habitat fragmentation, and urban design at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, German. She began working for Duolingo as a German language expert in 2011, and has authored a German for English speakers and English for German speakers course. Currently her work focuses on building online and offline communities around language learning and exchange. Over the past year she has started collaborations with language revitalization advocates from the Diné (Navajo), ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (an indigenous language of Hawaii), and Māori (an indigenous language of New Zealand) communities. Myra is interested in natural and linguistic diversity, what it means when a language is “lost” or “extinct”, and how we experience different kinds of loss.