Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, is a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop, and the co-editor of the volume, Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and Southern California Law Review.
A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on “Intersectionality” has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution.
Crenshaw authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nation’s World Conference on Racism, served as the Rapporteur for the conference’s Expert Group on Gender and Race Discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.
Crenshaw has worked extensively on a variety of issues pertaining to gender and race in the domestic arena including violence against women, structural racial inequality, and affirmative action. She has served as a member of the National Science Foundation’s committee to research violence against women and has consulted with leading foundations, social justice organizations and corporations to advance their race and gender equity initiatives.
In 1996, she co-founded the African American Policy Forum to house a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion. Among the Forum’s projects are the Affirmative Action Research and Policy Consortium and the Multiracial Literacy and Leadership Initiative.
Twice awarded Professor of the Year at UCLA Law School, Crenshaw received the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award presented by the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, and the ACLU Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellowship from 2005-07.
Professor Crenshaw was born in Canton, Ohio in 1959. She received a B.A. from Cornell in 1981, a J.D. from Harvard Law in 1984, an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985