Urvashi Vaid

An attorney and organizer in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and broader social justice movement, and has served on the Board of the Gill Foundation since 2004. She is the Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, a project that studies how tradition based arguments are deployed against, and by, the LGBT and feminist movements. Vaid is the former executive director of the Arcus Foundation, a global social justice and conservation funder. She was Deputy Director of the Governance and Civil Society program of the Ford Foundation. Vaid held several leadership positions at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, including serving as its Executive Director, Media Director, and Director of its Policy Institute think-tank. She is a former staff attorney for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she initiated the organization’s work on HIV/AIDS in prisons. Vaid is author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation (Anchor, 1996); co-editor, with John D’Emilio and William Turner, of an anthology on public policy history titled Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Her forthcoming book, Irresistible Revolution: Race, Sex, Class and the LGBT Imagination, will be published by Magnus Books in the Spring of 2012. Vaid is a graduate of Vassar College and Northeastern University School of Law.