Julia Aker Duany was born in 1954, one of 32 children in village of cattle herders in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

She married Wal Duany, a government finance minister and former resistance fighter in the First Sudanese Civil War, in 1972.

[3] Duany worked at IU's Vincent and Lin Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and founded the South Sudanese Friends International in 1994.

[2] Following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, Duany returned to South Sudan to aid in its independence effort.

She also helped develop a program in 2014 to bring fourteen Sudanese women to the United States to earn master's degrees.