As executive vice president for programs at the Mellon Foundation, Carter Stewart works closely with Mellon’s president, board, and staff to shape the Foundation’s funding priorities and direction. Prior to joining the Foundation, Carter was a managing director of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation (DRK), where he identified and supported new investments and grantees—primarily early-stage, justice-oriented organizations. He was appointed by President Obama to serve as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, where he emphasized deterrence, crime prevention, and alternatives to incarceration. Carter has also been a litigator, held academic positions at the Ohio State University, taught history at Friends Seminary High School in Manhattan, and was a New York City Urban Fellow. He holds a BA in political science from Stanford University, an MA in education policy from Columbia University, and a JD from Harvard Law School.

For more information, please visit mellon.org.

Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights lawyer and scholar. She most recently stepped down after 10 years in leadership as the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. She currently serves as a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation. During her tenure at LDF, Ifill’s voice and analysis played a prominent role in shaping our national conversation about race and civil rights. She led the organization in groundbreaking litigation in the areas of voting rights, economic justice, and education, and took a prominent role in confronting police violence against unarmed Black people. Ifill continues to write scholarly articles and is currently completing a book about racial inequality and the future of American democracy, Is This America? which will be published by Penguin Press in 2024. Ifill graduated from Vassar College with a BA in English and earned her JD from New York University School of Law. She is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates and was named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. She serves on the board of the Mellon Foundation, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and on the Board of Trustees of New York University School of Law.
 
Follow Ifill on Twitter @SIfill_.

Stewart Kwoh is co-founder and co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project, an organization that works to bring the history, contributions, challenges and triumphs of Asian Americans to students across the country. He is also founder and president emeritus of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Southern California, which he led for 35 years and built into the largest Asian American civil rights organization in the US. He is nationally known for work on hate crimes, human trafficking, and race relations. In 1998, Kwoh became the first Asian American attorney awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 1983, he served as co-counsel for American Citizens for Justice and Lily Chin, the mother of Vincent Chin. Kwoh earned his bachelor’s degree from University of California, Los Angeles and his JD from the UCLA School of Law. He has taught at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Department, and was an instructor at the UCLA School of Law. He is also a past expert in residence at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

For more information, visit the Asian American Education Project.

Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, where she teaches constitutional law, family law, criminal law, and reproductive rights and justice. Her writing has appeared in a range of legal and lay publications, including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation. Prior to joining the NYU Law faculty, Murray was the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received the law school’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction, the Association of American Law School’s Derrick A. Bell Award, and, from March 2016 to June 2017, served as interim dean of the law school. Murray serves a legal analyst for MSNBC and is a co-host of Strict Scrutiny, a Crooked Media podcast about the Supreme Court. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Yale Law School, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. She is a member of the American Law Institute and the New York bar.

For more information, visit NYU Law's website or on Twitter @ProfMMurray.