Angela Y. Davis

Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-Feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped to establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped to develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire (2005). Recently, Dr. Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2015). Dr. Davis is an internationalist and anti-capitalist. Her work helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundthePolice movement.

The Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize is awarded to Dr. Angela Y. Davis for her lifetime achievements as a public intellectual advocating for racial, gender, and economic justice.