Atishi Marlena is a leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, and is a member of the party’s top decision-making forum, the Political Affairs Committee (PAC). She is presently the Advisor to the Deputy CM of Delhi, primarily on Education. She has been spearheading the Delhi Government’s interventions in the field of education and works on a policy level on improving the effectiveness of various stakeholders involved in Government schools.

Recipient of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship, she has done a Masters in Educational Research from the University of Oxford. She also worked as a History and English teacher at the Rishi Valley School for a brief period early on in her life. She was one of the key people who were involved in setting up of the Masters in Education program at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her academic work has primarily been in the field of alternative curriculum.

A History Major from St Stephen's College, Atishi spent over five years in a village close to Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, where she and her associates adopted a rural lifestyle and practiced organic farming for self-sufficient sustenance. Over the past decade, she has come to be known as an academic-activist and now as one of India's young politicians. She firmly believes politics is the only means to achieve lasting and large-scale change.