Soraya Chemaly

Soraya Chemaly is a feminist writer, media critic and activist whose work focuses on women’s rights and the role of gender in politics, religion and popular culture. She is a regular contributor to Salon, The Huffington Post, RHRealityCheck, The Guardian and Role/Reboot. Her writing also appears in Ms. Magazine, CNN and The Feminist Wire. Ms. Chemaly returned to feminist activism and writing after a professional career in strategic planning in the publishing, data, and technology fields. Ms. Chemaly was Senior Vice President of Marketing at Dutch publishing company VNU’s pioneering marketing information company, Claritas, Inc., (now part of Nielsen Research, Inc.). She joined the company after several years as an executive with the Gannett Company, prior to which she was a writer and editor at various publications and a founding principle in an urban monthly magazine in Washington, DC. Ms. Chemaly graduated from Georgetown University, where she founded that school’s feminist journal, The New Press, and attended Radcliffe College for post-graduate studies. She is a member of the national board of Emerge America, an organization that trains democratic women to run for office, sits on the advisory boards of Secular Woman and FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture. She was the 2013 recipient of both the Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy and the Secular Woman Activist of the Year Award.