SAKINA FAKHRI

Co-Founder/Test Prep Tutor

Sakina Fakhri is an experienced educator and tutor of standardized tests for students of all ages. She received her B.A. in English literature from Northwestern University, and upon graduation co-founded an elite secondary school in Cairo, Egypt, where at the age of twenty-one she became the founder, chairperson, and teacher of the newly created English Department.

Upon returning to the U.S., she acquired her M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University and then worked as a classroom instructor and private tutor. For several years she taught SAT, PSAT, and SHSAT test prep to middle school and high school students in Brooklyn. From 2006 through 2009, she worked as a classroom GRE instructor for Powerscore, an elite test preparation company that sent her to teach at prestigious universities in cities all over the country. She has since worked at several tutoring centers in Manhattan, teaching for the New York State tests, the SHSAT, the SSAT, the ERB, and the ISEE.

Beyond the teaching of the tests, Sakina has spent some time writing them. She worked as a content developer for the GMAT/LSAT/SAT at Knewton, a rapidly expanding educational start-up in Manhattan. There, as one of Knewton's lead writers and editors of academic content, she wrote practice test questions and course content for Knewton's online GMAT, LSAT, and SAT courses. Sakina was invited to review Barron’s 3rd edition SSAT/ISEE test preparation book and has contributed SAT Reading practice content for books by The Princeton Review.

Sakina’s own test scores include a 99th percentile on the GRE and a 97th percentile on the GMAT. Her knowledge of the LSAT is both deep and comprehensive: during her time at Knewton, she personally wrote, edited, or reviewed answer choice explanations for every Reading Comprehension and Logical Reasoning question in 66 official LSAT exams. In the area of youth tutoring, the vast majority of middle school students that Sakina tutored successfully gained admission to elite New York specialized or private schools, such as Stuyvesant and Horace Mann. Her tutees have been admitted to schools such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Columbia, Emory, Duke, MIT, and NYU.

Sakina's first short film, The Word Trader, debuted internationally in 2013 at the Cannes Film Festival in France and was later an official selection at the Manhattan Film Festival. She is the co-founder of Lazuli Literary Group, co-editor of AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought, and author of the novel The Speech of Flowers and Voiceless Things. Sakina is committed to writing in all of its forms, and believes that, given enough time and enough creativity, nothing should ever have to be said in quite the same way twice.