Maria Kurt is the founder and director of the French Institute of the North Shore and the French School. She earned a Master’s degree in French Language, Literature and Civilization from Middlebury College where she specialized in the teaching of French as a foreign language and evaluated a teaching method for her thesis. She was determined to understand how one acquires a second language and develop the most effective way to teach French. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in French from Miami University and a Master’s degree in Education from National Louis University.

She spent two years in Paris studying at the Université de Paris and the Institut Catholique. Maria was certified in education at San Francisco State University and continued studying education at Stanford University. She taught high school in Paris, San Francisco and Chicago for more than ten years.