Maria Damanaki is a Greek politician. She is a former president of the Synaspismos party of the left and former state member of the Hellenic Parliament within the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). She served as the Global Managing Director for Oceans at The Nature Conservancy. In this capacity leads a global team focused on how the world manages its oceans, including sustainable fisheries management, large-scale protection and restoration of coral reefs and other ecosystems, coastal resilience, and mapping and quantification of the full value of the world's oceans to people.

The Coalition of the Left, of Movements and Ecology, commonly known as Synaspismos and abbreviated to SYN (ΣΥΝ), was a Greek political party of the radical New Left. It was founded in 1991 and was known as the Coalition of the Left and Progress until 2003. In 2004 SYN was a founding member of the Party of the European Left.