Marianna Kepka is an organizational strategist, change leader, and trusted advisor with 20 years of experience helping leaders make sense of thorny challenges and turn ambitious ideas into meaningful, enduring progress. She has advised senior leaders across vision and strategy, organizational design, academic restructuring, governance, operating models, and large-scale implementation. She is particularly fascinated by how complex organizations really work—how strategy, people, structure, culture, and decision-making intersect, and what it takes to move all of them together.

Before founding Kepka Consulting, Marianna was a Director in Huron Consulting Group’s higher education practice. Working across a wide range of institutional contexts—from large public research universities and Ivy League institutions to small museums—she became known for building trust across diverse stakeholders and engaging people deeply to shape solutions with them, not simply for them. Previously, over 15 years at Northwestern University, Marianna developed deep institutional fluency—working across academic and administrative boundaries, advising and coaching senior leaders, and ultimately leading the university’s internal consulting practice.

Across her career, Marianna has become known for bringing structure to ambiguity, getting to the heart of the issue, and making connections others may miss. She combines analytical rigor with an instinct for people and context, helping leaders see challenges from new angles and find practical paths forward.

Marianna is curious by nature and a connector of ideas, people, and perspectives. That curiosity extends beyond her work: she loves learning, languages, travel, yoga, soccer, skiing, the outdoors, and almost anything that gets her near the water. Most of all, she loves spending time with her husband, two daughters, and their eternally anxious rescue dog.