Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, and curator who’s active in numerous social movements for prison abolition, racial justice, gender justice, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration, and a co-founder of numerous organizations including the Chicago Freedom School, Love and
Protect, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women and most recently Survived & Punished.
Mariame is also a co-organizer of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners who provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence.
As a Researcher in Residence at the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), Mariame Kaba works with Andrea J. Ritchie, fellow Researcher in Residence, on a new Social Justice Institute (SJI) initiative, Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action.
Mariame is on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance, and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. She was also a 2016-2017 Soros Justice Fellow.
Her writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Teen Vogue, and more. She runs the Prison Culture blog (www.usprisonculture.com/blog).
Mariame’s leadership, organizing, and influence extend widely as she offers a radical analysis that influences how people think and respond to how violence, prisons, and policing affect the lives of people of color.