Maria Mies was born in 1931 and is a German scholar and activist living in Cologne. She is the author of numerous groundbreaking works on women and globalisation. Among her books are Indian Women and Patriarchy (1980), The Lacemakers of Narsapur (1982), Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986; reprinted 1999), Women: The Last Colony (1988), Ecofeminism, with Vandana Shiva (1993), The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy (1999), with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen. There Is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization (2001) was published to celebrate the work of Maria Mies.

She is Professor of Sociology at the Fachhochschule in Cologne, Germany. In 1979 she established the Women and Development Programme at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands. She has been active in the women's movement and in women's studies since the late 1960s. She has published several books and many articles on feminist, ecological and Third World issues. One of her main concerns is the development of an alternative approach in methodology and in economics. Having retired from teaching in 1993, she continues to be active in the women's and other social movements. In recent years she has been actively campaigning against the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).