Urvashi Vaid Biography

Community organizer, author, and lawyer Urvashi Vaid has spent over three decades at the forefront of the LGBT and social justice movements. She presently serves as the Engaging Tradition Project's director at Columbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. The Projects aims to examine how movements for gender and sexual justice utilize and abuse the concept of tradition, as well as how tradition-based practices influence, facilitate, and/or constrain the work of these movements. Vaid is the author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation (Anchor, 1996), a political analysis of the LGBT movement in the United States, and Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and The Assumptions of LGBT Politics (Magnus Books, 2012), a collection of nine essays. She co-edited the public policy history anthology Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights (St. Martin's Press, 2000) with Drs. John D'Emilio and William Turner. Vaid has written chapters for several books and was a writer for The Advocate, the major gay and lesbian news magazine in the United States. She gives a lot of talks on topics including LGBT equality, civil and human rights, and social justice. LPAC, the first lesbian political action committee, was founded by Vaid and debuted in July 2012. She is a member of the Gill Foundation's board of directors, which works to ensure equitable opportunity for all people, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. She is the creator of The Vaid Group, a consulting firm that offers guidance to people and groups engaged in a variety of social justice-related endeavors. Vaid worked as a visiting senior fellow in the sociology department at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center for the 2010–2011 academic year. She held the position of executive director for the Arcus Foundation and Arcus Operating Foundation, two international grantmaking foundations that assist groups working for social justice and environmental conservation, from 2005 to 2010. Vaid served as the deputy director of the Ford Foundation's Governance and Civil Society Unit from January 2001 to August 2005. In this role, she oversaw a nationwide grant-making initiative aimed at bolstering the social justice and nonprofit sectors of US civil society. Vaid spent more than ten years working in a variety of positions at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), the oldest national LGBT civil rights organization; she first served as the organization's media director (7/86–7/89), then as executive director (8/89–12/92), and finally as the director of its Policy Institute Think-tank (1/97–1/01). Vaid worked as a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) National Prison Project from 1983 to 1986, where she started the group's efforts to combat HIV/AIDS in prisons. Vaid has received awards from SAGE, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY, the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association, the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR), the American Immigration Law Foundation, the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), Asian American Legal Defense Fund, the Paul Anderson Prize Foundation, and Lambda Legal. She also holds an honorary degree from the City University of New York's Queens College of Law. Community organizer, author, and lawyer Urvashi Vaid has spent over three decades at the forefront of the LGBT and social justice movements. She presently serves as the Engaging Tradition

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