Dr Marina Grasse is one of the co-founders of OWEN, a Berlin based womens' association. Since 1991, she is working for OWEN in different positions. She was born in Berlin in 1950 where she has been living ever since. Before establishing OWEN she has been working as a biologist for the Academy of Sciences in the German Democratic Republic, the Berlin University Hospital Charite and the Humboldt University Department of Philosophy. In the beginning of the 1980s, Marina Grasse was active in different independent peace movements in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). At the GDR institution Round Table she represented the citizens' committee People's Initative for Education, an organisation that she is also a co-founder of. In the first, and the last, freely elected GDR government of 1990 she was responsible for equality issues until the GDR joined the Federal Democratic Republic on October 3rd, 1990, rendering her unemployed for a short while. Together with other politically active women she developed a project called Womens' Network of Eastern and Western Europe, an organisation that later gave rise to OWEN. After 2006, OWEN shifted the focus of its political activities, concentrating more on gender and peace education. Subsequently, OWEN was renamed Mobile Academy for Gender Democracy and the Promotion of Peace. Marina Grasse was awarded the German Federal Cross of Merits for her political action in the German Democratic Republic.

For many years, her special interest has been to promote a special form of peace education in Germany and beyond. She aims at engendering both men and women to understand themselves as actors of peace and to stand up decisively for nonviolent forms of conflict settlement and peace promotion. Marina Grasse is both project coordinator and responsible for the educational development of the project Mobile Peace Academy OMNIBUS 1325. As a member of OMNIBUS1325 she is currently managing an exchange program for peace and human rights activists from the Caucasus and Bosnia Herzegovina. In her home town Berlin, she is responsible today for a district based women's project in Berlin Neukölln. Marina Grasse is mother to four grown up children and the grand-mother of two girls.