Michiel Leenaars (1972, Netherlands) is Director of Strategy at NLnet. He is responsible for defining and initating short term and long term policies and managing strategic activities within the NLnet foundation, and acts as its spokesperson to the press and society. He currently also leads NGI Zero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust, NGI0 Core and NGI0 Commons Fund, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative. He joined the management team of NLnet in 2007. He has a background in Physics at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and Theory and history of literature/Visual and verbal communication at Tilburg University.

He is active in a number of national and international organisations, such as The Commons Conservancy (chair), OpenDoc Society (vice-chair), SIDN Fund (Board of Advisors), and Petities.nl foundation (treasurer). He is co-founder and board member of Technology Commons Trust. In 2022 he was awarded the NLUUG Lifetime Achievement Award.