Risa Kaufman

Risa Kaufman is director of human rights at The Overbrook Foundation, where she leads the Foundation’s grantmaking and collaborations to advance reproductive health, rights, and justice and defend democracy in the United States, and support human rights defenders in Latin America.

To her role at Overbrook, Risa brings over 25 years of experience as a social justice and human rights lawyer dedicated to advancing gender, racial, and economic justice. Prior to joining the Foundation, Risa was director of U.S. human rights at the Center for Reproductive Rights and executive director of the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, among other litigation and advocacy positions. She taught U.S. human rights advocacy as an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and Columbia Law School and co-authored the law school casebook Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (with Martha F. Davis, Johanna Kalb, and Rachel Lopez). Risa is a co-founder and board member of A Better Balance, a national legal advocacy organization that promotes workplace justice. She received a B.A. from Tulane University and a J.D. from NYU School of Law and lives in the lower Hudson Valley with her family.