Keynote Speaker

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, curator, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the founder and director of \Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018.  

Mariame has co-founded multiple other organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect, the Just Practice Collaborativeand Survived & Punished

Kaba is the author of the New York Times Bestselle[]r We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Press 2021), Missing Daddy (Haymarket 2019), Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Faciltators with Shira Hassan (Project NIA, 2019), See You Soon (Haymarket, March 2022) and the forthcoming No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea Ritchie (The New Press, Aug 2022).

Mariame’s leadership, organizing and influence extend widely as she offers a radical analysis that influences how people think and respond to how violence, prisons and policing affect the lives of people of color.