B.A., Cornell, 1981; J.D., Harvard, 1984; LL.M., Wisconsin, 1985. Presently professor of law at Columbia and UCLA. Has written in the areas of civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) at Columbia Law School, which she founded in 2011. She is also co-founder of the African American Policy Forum.
Crenshaw's work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review. A founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory workshop; co-editor of Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Has lectured nationally and internationally on race matters, addressing audiences throughout Europe, Africa, and South America. She has facilitated workshops for civil rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa.
Crenshaw's work on race and gender was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. In 2001, she authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nations' World Conference on Racism and helped facilitate the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration. In the domestic arena, she has served as a member of the National Science Foundation's committee to research violence against women and has assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill.
In 1996, she co-founded the African-American Policy Forum to highlight the centrality of gender in racial justice discourse. Professor Crenshaw is also a founding member of the Women's Media Initiative and writes for Ms. Magazine, the Nation and other print media and is a regular commentator on NPR's "The Tavis Smiley Show" and MSNBC. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Crenshaw facilitates the Bellagio Project, an international network of scholars working in the field of social inclusion from five continents.
She was twice named Professor of the Year at UCLA Law School and received the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award, presented by the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, for her path breaking work on black women and the law. She also received the ACLU Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellowship in 2005-2007. She has reserached and lectured widely in Brazil as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair for Latin America, and was the recipient of the 2008-2009 Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship. She was awarded with an in-residence fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford University in 2008-2009.
