Teresa Heinz

Teresa Heinz Kerry (born October 5, 1938), also known as Teresa Heinz, née Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira, is a Mozambican–born American businesswoman and philanthropist. She is the widow of former U.S. Senator H. John Heinz III (R-Pennsylvania), and the wife of current U.S. Secretary of State and former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John Kerry (D-Massachusetts).

Early life

Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira was born in Mozambique, at the time a colony of the Portuguese Empire, to Portuguese parents, tropical-disease specialist Dr. José Simões-Ferreira, Jr. (1910–1989), and Irene Thierstein (1912–1997). Irene, a Portuguese and British national in Lourenço Marques, was the daughter of Alberto Thierstein, a British national from Valletta, Malta (at the time a British-ruled territory), and Maria Burló, born in Alexandria, Egypt, who both migrated to Portuguese East Africa.

In 1960, Teresa Simões-Ferreira earned a Bachelor of Arts in Romance Languages and Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1963, she graduated from the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Geneva and moved to the United States to be an interpreter at the United Nations.