SOCIAL PRACTICE, INTERDISCIPLINARY, NONFICTION

PARDISS KEBRIAEI

Pardiss Kebriaei is a writer, human rights lawyer, and professor at CUNY School of Law. She was awarded a 2024–2026 Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Born in Iran, she immigrated with her family to Oklahoma as a child and spent her first years in the United States in Norman and Stillwater. Her work is shaped by personal and historical connections, including her father’s experience as a political prisoner in Iran.

For nearly 25 years, Kebriaei has worked in human rights advocacy, representing people detained at Guantánamo Bay and challenging other dimensions of the post-9/11 “war on terror.” Her work has also focused extensively on incarceration in the United States, including efforts with movement organizations to end sentences of death by incarceration. In Tulsa and across Oklahoma, she engages with organizations and advocates exploring incarceration and detention.

Before joining CUNY Law, she served at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Reproductive Rights and taught international human rights law and post-9/11 litigation at Hunter and Brooklyn Colleges.

Her writing has appeared in academic publications and in The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. Her practice has been supported by residencies at the Lannan Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, PLAYA, and Willapa Bay AiR. She was a finalist in nonfiction literature for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2020 and a 2021–2022 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.