Marilyn J. Friedland is a collector and patron of the arts. She is a member of the Wrightsman Fellows and Visiting Committee of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as a member of the Friends of Asian Art at The Met. She is a Director of The Wallace Collection in America, a Sustaining Fellow at The Frick Collection, a member of the Association of Fellows at The Morgan Library and Museum, a benefactor of The American Ceramic Circle, a patron of the Metropolitan Opera, a supporter of the American Associates of the National Theatre, Lincoln Center, Asia Society, the American Friends of The Shanghai Museum, and a former long-term member of the Museum Council at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, where she endowed the Friedland Family Acquisitions Fund and the Rare Book Room in the Music Department at Lincoln Hall. She has supported the publication of European Porcelain: In The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Jeffrey Munger and Elizabeth Sullivan, Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts by Wolf Burchard, Sir Richard Wallace: Connoisseur, Collector & Philanthropist by Suzanne Higgott and David Lindo, Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain by Rosalind Savill, and Rubens: The Two Great Landscapes by Lucy Davis.

Marilyn J. Friedland received her BA from Cornell University and her MEd from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.