ERA Education Project

Kamala Lopez Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:55:41 +0000

Kamala Lopez (Yale University BA)
Actress, Director and Political Activist

Kamala Lopez is an award-winning actress, screenwriter, director and producer. Born in New York City to an Indian mother and a Venezuelan father, Lopez lived with her parents in Caracas until age 14 when the family returned to the United States. While still in high school in Brooklyn, she was cast on Sesame Street as Mercedes, Maria’s cousin, a role she portrayed for two seasons before being accepted to Yale where she double majored in Philosophy and Theatre Studies.

Lopez has worked as an actor in over thirty feature films including Born in East L.A., Deep Cover, The Burning Season (winner of 2 Emmys, 3 Golden Globes and the Humanitas Prize), Clear and Present Danger, Lightning Jack, and I Heart Huckabees. She has starred in over sixty television shows including Medium, 24, Alias, and NYPD Blue. She also hosted the PBS series Wired Science.

Lopez formed production company Heroica Films in 1995 with the mission to write, direct and produce media for women, about women and utilizing women both in front and behind the
camera. Since then Lopez and Heroica Films have produced, directed and written many short films, several features, film festivals, podcasts and virtual internet media campaigns.

Her feature directorial debut, A Single Woman, about the life of first Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, won the 2009 Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s
Political Caucus and screened by invitation in the United States Congress, at the Smithsonian Institution, the United Nationsand National Arts Club as well as universities across the country. In 2012 her short Spanish-language film Ese Beso won the Audience Award at the Boyle Heights Latina Film Festival.Her romantic comedy feature film (writer/actress/producer) Legal Affairs goes into production the summer of 2013.

Lopez is Founder and Executive Director of The ERA Education Project, a new national media campaign to educate the public about the need to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. She is the Founding Director of the Los Angeles Bureau of GlobalGirl Media, which nurtures the voices and self-expression of young girls internationally. Lopez sits on the Boards of Girls & Gangs and The Women’s International Film and Television Showcase. She served on the Board of Young Artists United and has worked with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Office in his Parnership for L.A. Schools in South Central Los Angeles as well as working with H.E.A.R.T., the L.A. Unified School District’s Gang and Crime Prevention Unit.

In 2009 she was given a retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art for her work in film and television. She is a blogger for the Huffington Post and an Aspen Institute Scholar. Lopez is a 2011 Woman of Courage award-winner (from NWPC) and was named one of the 21 Leaders for the 21st Century by Women’s eNews in 2012.

Kah Walla Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:36:19 +0000

Kah Walla (Yale World Fellow)
Entrepreneur, Activist and Elected Official of Cameroon

Kah Walla is an entrepreneur, activist and elected official from Cameroon. She is recognized internationally for her expertise in management and for her commitment to Africa, development, women and youth.

On October 9, 2011, Kah Walla ran as a candidate for the presidency of Cameroon. In a country which has only known two presidents in the last 50 years, her The Time is Now! Campaign was groundbreaking for the Cameroon political scene. Kah Walla is today one of Cameroon’s foremost political leaders and is often cited as an example of a new generation of leadership throughout Africa.

As an entrepreneur, Kah launched STRATEGIES! seventeen years ago. This African firm offers consulting services in leadership and management, meeting the highest standards of the international market. STRATEGIES! serves multinational firms as well as international development organizations. Kah is a board member of the World Entrepreneurship Forum, and in 2008, she was one of seven women entrepreneurs in Africa profiled in the report, Doing Business: Women in Africa, released as part of a joint effort between the Doing Business project and the World Bank’s Gender Action Plan.

For 25 years, Kah has focused on good governance, the rights of women and youth and the rule of law. She has worked with civil society in Cameroon and throughout Africa, developing policies and projects at international, national and local levels with farmers, traders, motorbike drivers, persons with disabilities, fishermen, student associations and governments.

In 2007, she campaigned and was elected to the Douala City Council. Her political leadership is known for its focus on transparency and sound budget management. In 2008, she stood up against a constitutional amendment designed to eliminate presidential term limits. She has also played a key role in advocating for overhauling the independent electoral commission. In 2009, Kah created Cameroon Ô’Bosso, a citizen movement to register voters and advocate for 11 separate criteria of electoral reform.

Ursula Burton

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:31:05 +0000

Ursula Burton (Yale University BA)
Council member, YaleWomen; Partner, Five Sisters Productions

Ursula Burton is a filmmaker, actor and co-founder of Five Sisters Productions. Together with her four sisters, Burton has produced commercials, PSAs, short films and feature films includingLetting Go of God (Showtime), Just Friends (AMC), Manna from Heaven (MGM) and Temps. Burton wrote and directed the award-winning comedy, The Happiest Day of His Life, which won a Viewer’s Choice Award on MTV’s LOGO Channel and qualified for the Academy Awards, and is currently being used in academic and social programs as an educational tool to promote open conversations about gender. Projects now in production include Old Guy (a comedic web series about the image of aging in the media) and Kings, Queens, & In-Betweens (a documentary on drag queens, kings, and transgender performers in Ohio). Projects in development includeMercury 13 (a feature inspired by the 13 women tested to be astronauts in 1961) and a fairy tale feature film. In addition, the specialty card decks she created, “52 Questions Before Marriage or Moving In” and “52 Questions Before Baby,” are being distributed by the acclaimed therapy and research center, The Gottman Institute.

As an actor, Burton’s had recurring roles on The Office, The War at Home and the hit BBC sitcom My Family, and is currently recurring on Grey’s Anatomy and Hart of Dixie. Other TV roles includeCastle, Scandal, 2 Broke Girls, Happy Endings, The Middle, Criminal Minds, Touch, Ghost Whisperer, The Young & The Restless, The Ellen Show, The Bold & the Beautiful, Shake It Up!,Spy and The West Wing. Film roles include Sgt. Bilko, Mafia!, Death of a Saleswoman and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Voice work includes the BBC Radio 4 “The Hireling,”Doctor Who, Dark Shadows and Stargate.

Burton graduated from Yale University cum laude and now sits on the YaleWomen Council, is a board member of both YaleWomen LA and The Yale Club of LA and is a member of the Alliance of Women Directors.

Betsy West Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:24:42 +0000

Betsy West
Associate Professor, Professional Practice, Columbia School of Journalism; Executive Producer,MAKERS: Women Who Make America

Betsy West is an associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and executive producer of MAKERS: Women Who Make America, the online video archivewww.makers.com and PBS documentary about the women’s movement that aired nationwide in February, 2013.

Betsy began her career at ABC News where her work as co-creator and executive producer of Turning Point and senior producer at Nightline earned her 21 Emmy Awards and two duPont-Columbia Awards. As senior vice president at CBS News from 1998-2005, she oversaw 60 Minutes and 48 Hours and was executive-in-charge of the PrimeTime Emmy award-winning documentary 9/11. She joined Storyville Films in 2006, where she co-produced Oren Jacoby’s theatrical documentary Constantine’s Sword and is currently producing The Lavender Scare, a filmabout the origins of the gay rights movement.

Joanne Lipman Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:20:20 +0000

Joanne Lipman (Yale University BA)
Journalist, Media Adviser and Co-author of Strings Attached; Member, Yale University Council

Joanne Lipman is one of the nation’s most prominent journalists and commentators. She is co-author of the upcoming book Strings Attached (Hyperion, October 2013), and an adviser to media organizations such as CNN, Yahoo and NYPR, for which she created the business programMoney Talking.

Ms. Lipman was founding Editor-in-Chief of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine and portfolio.com from 2005 to 2009. The magazine won Loeb and National Magazine awards and spawned Michael Lewis’s bestseller The Big Short, based on his cover story about the financial crisis.

Previously, Ms. Lipman was a Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, the first woman to attain that post. While at the Journal, Ms. Lipman supervised coverage that won three Pulitzer Prizes. Ms. Lipman joined the Journal in 1983 as a reporter in New York, and was the paper’s first Advertising columnist (1989), a Page One editor (1993), creator and Editor-in-Chief of Weekend Journal (1998) and creator of Personal Journal (2002). She was named Deputy Managing Editor in 2000.

Ms. Lipman is a frequent commentator on business issues, appearing on CNN, CBS, and CNBC, and also has been a contributing columnist to Newsweek. She is a member of the Yale University Council; Breastcancer.org’s advisory board; the boards of the Yale Daily News and Yale Alumni Magazine; and the Council on Foreign Relations. She received the Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications in 2001.

Ms. Lipman is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University. She and her husband live in New York with their two children, Andrew and Rebecca (’12 BA, ’13 MPH).

Jane Mayer Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:17:04 +0000

Jane Mayer (Yale University BA)
Writer and Journalist, The New Yorker

Jane Mayer joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in March 1995. Based in Washington, D.C., she writes about politics, culture and national security for the magazine. Recent subjects include a piece about the political influence of Charles and David Koch and coverage of the role of money in the 2012 presidential campaign.

Before joining The New Yorker, Mayer was for twelve years a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. In 1984, she became the Journal’s first female White House correspondent. She was also a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent for the paper. Among other stories, she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the final days of Communism in the Soviet Union.

Mayer was the 2008 winner of the John Chancellor Award for Journalistic Excellence, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 2008, and winner in 2009 of the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard, the 2009 Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University, the 2009 Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s 2009 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Prize from Columbia, the 2009 Sidney Hillman Award, the 2009 Ambassador Award from the English-Speaking Union, and the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. She was also a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been a finalist three times for the National Magazine award and was nominated twice by the Journal for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2011, she was the winner of the James Aronson Award for social justice journalism, and in 2012, she was awarded the Toner Prize for political reporting.

Before joining the Journal in 1982, Mayer worked as a metropolitan reporter for the WashingtonStar. She began her career in journalism as a stringer for Time magazine while still a student in college.

Mayer is the author of the best-selling 2008 book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War in Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” which was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times, the Economist Magazine, Salon, Slate and Bloomberg. In 2010 the NYU Journalism School named it one of the ten most important works of journalism of the decade. She was also the co-author of two additional best-selling books. “Strange Justice,” written with Jill Abramson, published in 1994, was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction. Her first book, “Landslide: The Unmaking of the president 1984-1988,” co-authored by Doyle McManus, was an acclaimed account of the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan Administration.

In 2009, Mayer was chosen as Princeton University’s Ferris Professor of the Humanities, teaching an undergraduate seminar on political reporting. She has been a speaker at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Mount Holyoke, Northwestern, Boston College and Grinnell, among other schools.

Mayer, who was born in New York, graduated with honors from Yale in 1977 and continued her studies in history at Oxford. She lives in Washington with her husband, Bill Hamilton, and daughter, Kate.

Deborah L. Rhode Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:10:19 +0000

Deborah L. Rhode (Yale University BA, Yale Law School JD)
Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law, Director of the Center on the Legal Profession, and Director of the Program in Law and Social Entrepreneurship, Stanford University; Former Fellow, Yale Corporation

Deborah L. Rhode is the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law, the director of the Center on the Legal Profession, and the director of the Program in Law and Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University. She is the founding president of the International Association of Legal Ethics, the former president of the Association of American Law Schools, the former chair of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, the former founding director of Stanford’s Center on Ethics, a former trustee of Yale University, and the former director of Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

She also served as senior counsel to the minority members of the Judiciary Committee, the United States House of Representatives, on presidential impeachment issues during the Clinton administration. She is the most frequently cited scholar on legal ethics. She has received the American Bar Association’s Michael Franck award for contributions to the field of professional responsibility; the American Bar Foundation’s W. M. Keck Foundation Award for distinguished scholarship on legal ethics, the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award for her work on expanding public service opportunities in law schools, and the White House’s Champion of Change award for a lifetime’s work in increasing access to justice. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and vice chair of the board of Legal Momentum (formerly the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund).

Professor Rhode graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Yale College and received her legal training from Yale Law School. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, she joined the Stanford faculty. She is the author or coauthor of over twenty books and over 250 articles. She also serves as a columnist for the National Law Journal and has also published editorials in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Slate. Recent publications include The Beauty Bias, Women and Leadership, Legal Ethics, Gender and Law, Moral Leadership and Access to Justice.

Judith Resnik Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:06:43 +0000

Judith Resnik

Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Honorary Professor, Faculty of Laws, University College London
Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, courts, equality and citizenship. She also holds a term appointment as an Honorary Professor, Faculty of Laws, University College London.

Professor Resnik’s books include Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (with Dennis Curtis, Yale University Press, 2011); Federal Courts Stories (co-edited with Vicki C. Jackson, Foundation Press 2010); and Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (co-edited with Seyla Benhabib, NYU, 2009). Recent articles include Globalization(s), Privatization(s), Constitutionalization, and Statization: Icons and Experiences of Sovereignty in the 21st century (International Journal of Constitutional Law, forthcoming); Comparative (In) Equalities: CEDAW, the Jurisdiction of Gender, and the Heterogeneity of Transnational Law Production (International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2012);Fairness in Numbers (Harvard Law Review, 2011); Detention, The War on Terror, and the Federal Courts (Columbia Law Journal, 2010); and Interdependent Federal Judiciaries: Puzzling about Why and How to Value the Independence of Which Judges (Daedalus, 2008).

Professor Resnik has chaired the Sections on Procedure, on Federal Courts and on Women in Legal Education of the American Association of Law Schools. She is a Managerial Trustee of the International Association of Women Judges and the founding director of Yale’s Arthur Liman Public Interest Program, which supports fellowships for Yale Law School graduates; summer fellowships at Yale, Princeton, Spelman, Brown, Harvard and Barnard; and colloquia on the civil and criminal justice systems. She served as a co-chair of Yale’s Women’s Faculty Forum. She is currently the chair of Yale’s Global Constitutional Seminar, a part of the Gruber Program on Global Justice and Women’s Rights. Professor Resnik is also an occasional litigator and argued Mohawk Industries, Inc. v. Carpenter, decided in 2009 by the United States Supreme Court. Professor Resnik has testified before Congress, before rulemaking committees of the federal judiciary, and before the House of Commons of Canada.

In 1998, Professor Resnik was the recipient of the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award from the Commission on Women of the American Bar Association. In 2001, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2002, a member of the American Philosophical Society, where she delivered the Henry LaBarre Jayne Lecture in 2005. In 2008, Professor Resnik received the Outstanding Scholar of the Year Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. In 2010, she was named a recipient of the Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Prize, awarded to outstanding faculty in higher education in the fields of psychology or law. That year, Professor Resnik also had a cameo role in the Doug Liman film, Fair Game. In 2012, her book, Representing Justice (with Dennis Curtis) was selected by the American Publishers Association as the recipient of two PROSE awards for excellence, in social sciences and in law/legal studies, and was selected by the American Society of Legal Writers for the 2012 SCRIBES award.

Margaret H. Marshall Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:03:04 +0000

Margaret H. Marshall ’76 JD, ’12 LLDH
Senior Counsel, Choate Hall & Stewart, LLP; Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer, Harvard Law School; Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; Fellow, Yale Corporation

Margaret H. Marshall is Senior Counsel, Choate Hall & Stewart, LLP, and a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Harvard Law School. Until her retirement in December 2010, she was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

Born and educated in South Africa, she earned a B.A. from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a master’s degree in education from Harvard University. After graduating from Yale Law School, she practiced law for sixteen years in Boston, becoming a partner at Choate Hall & Stewart, before her appointment as Vice President and General Counsel of Harvard University in1992.

She was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court in 1996 and appointed Chief Justice in 1999, the first woman to hold that position. During her fourteen years on the Court, Chief Justice Marshall wrote more than 300 opinions, many of them groundbreaking, including the 2003 decision inGoodridge v. Department of Public Health, which declared that the Massachusetts Constitution prohibits the state from denying same-sex couples access to civil marriage. The ruling made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage. Her tenure as Chief Justice was marked by her many efforts to improve the administration of justice, making the Massachusetts judiciary more transparent, efficient and accountable, as well as improving access to justice throughout the court system.

Chief Justice Marshall served as an Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation from 2004 to 2010; she was appointed a Successor Fellow in September 2012. She is a member of the Council of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Committee on Science, Technology and Law of the National Academy of Sciences. The recipient of numerous professional awards, she received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Yale in 2012.

Ellen Gibson McGinnis Biography

Kamala — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 04:59:46 +0000

Ellen Gibson McGinnis (Yale University BA)
Chair, YaleWomen; Partner, Haynes and Boone LLP

Ellen Gibson McGinnis is the Chair of YaleWomen. Together with Nancy Stratford ’77 B.A., Ellen led the effort to focus the energy of Yale women alums to form YaleWomen, which was formally launched in December 2011. For eleven years, ending in June 2012, she served on the Board of Governors of the Yale Alumni Association (AYA) as a Board member, Secretary, Treasurer, Vice Chair, Chair and Immediate-Past Chair. She has also served in the past as Treasurer for the Yale Class of 1982, in various officer positions in the Yale Club of Dallas and the Yale Alumni Association of Maryland, as a delegate to the AYA Assembly and as a Class Agent for the Yale Alumni Fund. Ellen is currently a member of the Council of Women’s Health Research at Yale. Ellen received the Class of 1982 Distinguished Service Award in 1997 and the Yale Medal in November 2012.

Ellen graduated cum laude from Yale in 1982 with a degree in American Studies and earned her J.D. at New York University School of Law in 1985. She is married to her Yale classmate, David, and lives in Baltimore with their children, Anna (15) and Patrick (almost 13).

In her professional life, Ellen is a partner with Haynes and Boone, LLP, a law firm known for its culture of teamwork and client-centric focus. Ellen works with financial institutions on complex loans to private equity funds for major U.S. and foreign lenders. Her practice centers on the representation of lead agents in subscription facility lending, a practice for which the firm is recognized as an industry leader. She has served on many firm committees and is currently a member of the firm’s Board of Directors, co-chair of the Admission to Partnership Committee, and Chair of the Retirement Committee.