SOCIAL PRACTICE, INTERDISCIPLINARY, NONFICTION

PARDISS KEBRIAEI

Pardiss Kebriaei is a writer and human rights lawyer based in New York City. 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.

Since 2007, she has worked at a nonprofit organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she joined a project created after 9/11 to represent people detained at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She now focuses on issues of mass incarceration in the United States. Her current work is addressing practices of life and long-term imprisonment and the effects and reverberations, from the person incarcerated to prison staff, families and communities. During her fellowship, she hopes to engage with people and groups working on issues of incarceration in Oklahoma, which has among the highest rates in the country.

Her writing has appeared in publications including the Guardian, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, and Rolling Stone, and been supported by residencies at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Headlands Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, PLAYA, Willapa Bay AiR, and Yaddo. In 2020 she was a finalist in nonfiction literature for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. In 2021-22, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.