Sigríður Ásdís Snævarr
first woman to be appointed as an ambassador in Iceland, serving as ambassador of Iceland to Sweden from 1991 to 1996
Sigríður Ásdís Snævarr (born 23 June 1952) is an Icelandic diplomat and was the first woman to be appointed as an ambassador by Iceland, serving as ambassador to Sweden from 1991 to 1996.
Education
Sigríður was a fellow at Harvard Russian Research Center and holds a teaching diploma in Italian from Perugia University, a B.Sc.Econ in Economic International Relations from the London School of Economics, and a M.A. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy where she studied on a Fulbright Scholarship.
Professional life
Sigríður joined the Icelandic foreign service in 1978 and started her diplomatic career in the Soviet Union in 1979 at the height of the Cold War. She served as counsellor at the embassy of Iceland in Bonn, before she broke ground being the first Icelandic woman to be appointed as ambassador, in 1991. She has served as Iceland's ambassador to Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. While posted in Paris she also served as the Permanent Representative to OECD, to FAO and to UNESCO during the time when Iceland had a seat on the executive board.
In 2008 Sigríður took a temporary leave of absence from the foreign service and started a private company, “Nýttu kraftinn,” to train and empower 1100 job seekers in the wake of the Icelandic banking crisis. In 2013 she published a book reflecting on her job retraining efforts.
Sigríður now trains new diplomats and coaches ambassadors before new postings. She is in the steering group guiding the future work of Icelandic diplomacy and leads a unit of home-based ambassadors in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sigríður Ásdís Snævarr” is first woman to be appointed as an ambassador in Iceland, serving as ambassador of Iceland to Sweden from 1991 to 1996. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sigríður, Ásdís and Snævarr, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55843789. VIAF identifies the subject as 347152138616210980957. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1991, 1996 and 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sigríður Ásdís Snævarr” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.