Kim McKay

Kim Coral McKay AO (born 1959) is an Australian environmentalist, author, entrepreneur and international marketing and communications consultant. Since April 2014 she has been the CEO and Executive Director of the Australian Museum, the first woman to hold the position.

She co-founded the Clean Up Australia organisation and the Clean Up The World campaign, a project held in conjunction with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and which operates in over 100 countries. She co-created The Genographic Project for National Geographic which traces humankind’s genetic history over the past 60,000 years, and is the author of five books.

McKay was born in Sydney to Francis Gordon and Coral McKay. She was educated at Mackellar Girls’ High School and attended the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) where she graduated with a BA Communications degree majoring in journalism, public relations and sociology in 1981.

Her career has focused on adventure pursuits and the environment. She was a project manager on all four BOC Challenge solo around the world yacht races in the 1980s and 90s, a media representative on the APSA World Pro Surfing tour in the 1980s, executive director of Discovery Channel Eco-Challenge in Australia, Morocco and Argentina in the late 1990s, and part of National Geographic research and filming expeditions to Peru, Egypt and India.

In 1989, after helping stage the historic Clean Up Sydney Harbour Day where 40,000 people turned out, McKay co-founded Clean Up with solo yachtsman Ian Kiernan. She served as Deputy Chairwoman from 1989 to 2009. Clean Up Australia is one of the largest community environmental projects in Australia annually attracting more than half a million volunteers.

In 1992 she co-founded Clean Up the World, securing partnership with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and international corporate support. The program operates in over 100 countries with 30 million participants annually. McKay told ABC radio that ‘The belief that everyone can make a difference is a driving theme behind my actions’.

In 2004 McKay returned to Australia after almost seven years working in the United States in cable television for two non-fiction channels, Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channels International (NGCI). She joined NGCI as Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications in June 2000.

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