Mary Kostakidis (born 1954) is an Australian television presenter. She is the former weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter and was the face of SBS across two decades.
Kostakidis was the first woman appointed to present a national prime time news bulletin in Australia. She was a member of the management team that set up and developed SBS Television in 1980 and went on to present its flagship World News for 20 years, resigning in 2007. Her board and committee appointments during nearly 3 decades at SBS and subsequently reflect a strong commitment to social justice and the arts.
She has served as a member of the Fred Hollows Foundation Board, the Sydney Theatre Board, the National Library of Australia Council, the ResMed Foundation Board, and is a former Chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation. She is currently on the Advisory panel of the Sydney Peace Foundation, USYD, the Freilich Foundation, ANU and The Privacy Foundation.
The Sydney Peace Foundation is a University of Sydney Foundation and its major Partner in Peace is the City of Sydney. Annually it awards Australia's only international prize for peace, the Sydney Peace Prize. Past recipients include Muhammad Yunus, Xanana Gusmão, Mary Robinson, Hanan Ashrawi, Arundhati Roy, Hans Blix, Irene Khan, Patrick Dodson, and Noam Chomsky, and in 2011 its third-ever Gold Medal for 'exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights' was awarded to her fellow Australian journalist Julian Assange.