Kira Shepherd

Kira Shepherd is Associate Director of Racial Justice at the Public Rights/ Private Conscience project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. The Public Rights/ Private Conscience project is a unique law and policy think tank that conceptualizes and operationalizes new frames for understanding religious exemptions and their relationship to reproductive and sexual liberty and equality rights. Before joining Columbia Law School she was the Executive Director at The Black Institute (TBI), an action think tank that leads advocacy work in the areas of immigration, education, the environment, and economic justice. Prior to working at TBI, Kira was a Campaign Manager at ColorOfChange.org, the nation’s largest online civil rights organization, where she worked on criminal justice and corporate accountability campaigns. She also worked at Families for Freedom, a human rights organization by and for families facing and fighting deportation, and Make the Road New York, the largest member-led economic justice group in New York. Kira graduated from Rutgers University School of Law, Newark with a Juris Doctorate degree.