Halla Tómasdóttir was born in Reykjavík on 11 October 1968. Her mother, Kristjana Sigurðardóttir, worked as a special education teacher. Her father, Tómas Björn Þórhallsson, was a master plumber; he died in 2008. She grew up in a country that was already becoming known for experiments in gender equality. One childhood memory she has often described is the Icelandic women’s strike of 24 October 1975, when her mother and aunts left ordinary household routines and joined a national day of action meant to show that women’s unpaid and paid work mattered. She has said the episode helped form an early sense that she herself might want to matter. She was eleven when Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was elected president in 1980, the first woman in the world to be chosen as a head of state in a direct democratic election. That precedent later framed how many Icelanders read her own path.
She finished commercial school at Verzlunarskóli Íslands in 1986 and then went to the United States as an exchange student, attending Evansville Central High School. She completed a bachelor’s degree in business administration at Auburn University at Montgomery in 1993, concentrating on management and human resources, and an MBA in international management at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in 1995. She later undertook doctoral work in leadership studies at Cranfield University in Britain. After graduate school she spent roughly a decade in corporate human resources and organizational development at Mars and Pepsi in the United States. She has described that period as professionally useful but ultimately unsatisfying, and she returned to Iceland looking for work with a clearer public purpose.
Back home she became director of human resources at the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation and soon joined the early team building Reykjavík University. There she helped establish executive education and led Auður, a program for women’s entrepreneurship and leadership named after Auður the Deep-Minded, a medieval settler remembered for independence and judgment. The word also means wealth or good fortune. In 2005 she and her husband, Björn Skúlason, whom she married in 2004, had a daughter they named Auður; they have two children.
In 2006 she became the first woman to serve as chief executive of the Iceland Chamber of Commerce. The following year she left to co-found Auður Capital with Kristín Pétursdóttir. The firm was built around the idea that investment could combine returns with explicit principles: risk awareness, straight dealing, and attention to what the founders called emotional capital as well as financial capital. It was a female-led house in a financial sector still dominated by men, and it launched on the eve of the 2008 banking collapse. Supporters later pointed to its relatively limited losses in the crash as evidence that a more cautious, values-framed approach had practical as well as moral content. In 2009 she and Pétursdóttir received the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award, associated with McKinsey and INSEAD. She has also been recognized by the Association of Businesswomen in Iceland, for MBA teaching, and with an equality award from Kópavogur.
The crash pushed her further into civic life. She was one of the founders of Mauraþúfan, the group that organized the 2009 National Assembly, a large public gathering meant to debate what kind of society Iceland should rebuild. She later chaired WE2015, an international meeting on closing gender gaps. Those roles placed her between business, civil society, and public argument without tying her to a political party. She has remained an independent.
In 2016 she ran for the presidency for the first time. She entered as a political outsider and finished second to Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, with about 27.9 percent of the vote. Commentators noted both the sincerity of her campaign style and the skepticism that met a candidate from finance rather than party politics. She did not win, but the result established her as a national figure outside corporate circles.
From 2018 to 2024 she was chief executive and “chief change catalyst” of The B Team, a nonprofit collective of business and civil-society leaders co-founded by Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz. The organization presses companies and governments on climate, inequality, and what it calls responsible governance. The post gave her an international platform and a language of purpose-driven business that she had already used at Auður Capital. She took leave from the role to campaign again.
She announced her second presidential candidacy on 17 March 2024. Guðni was not seeking another term. The field was crowded, and early polls put her support near five percent. Her numbers rose through the spring. She emphasized the effects of social media on young people’s mental health, the management of tourism, and the social consequences of artificial intelligence, while presenting herself as a unifier rather than a party politician. On 1 June 2024 she won with 73,182 votes, about 34.1 percent, ahead of former prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir by roughly nine or ten points. Analysts described tactical voting in a multi-candidate race. She took office on 1 August 2024 as Iceland’s seventh president and the second woman to hold the post, succeeding Guðni and following Vigdís.
The Icelandic presidency is not a governing executive. The prime minister and cabinet direct policy; the president is head of state, with ceremonial duties, a role in forming governments, and limited reserve powers, including the ability in defined circumstances to refuse to sign legislation and send it to referendum. Halla has described the office in terms of unity, dialogue, and the representation of Iceland abroad. Early in her term a poll reported satisfaction at about 45 percent, lower than recent predecessors, a reminder that the symbolic office is still judged in real time. She has said she regards two or three terms as a reasonable span, in line with her immediate predecessor, though Icelandic presidents face no formal term limit.
Her public biography is often told as a line from the 1975 strike and the 1980 election of Vigdís, through American business schools and corporate human resources, to a women’s entrepreneurship program, a principles-based investment firm that met the financial crisis, a civic assembly after the crash, a near-miss presidential campaign, and leadership of an international business-reform group. The through-line she offers is that leadership should be gender-balanced, explicit about values, and aimed at something larger than quarterly results. Whether that argument holds as a governing style is constrained by the office itself: she does not run ministries or pass budgets. What she does shape is the tone of the head of state in a small, highly literate democracy that has long treated gender equality and post-crisis institutional repair as part of its national story.