Mona Tawatao, Chair of the Equal Justice Society Board of Directors, Eva Paterson, and everyone here at EJS welcome Kelly McCreary and Michael Harris as new board members. Learn more about them below.
“Transforming race consciousness through the arts is a key part our mission at EJS,” said Eva Paterson, President of the Equal Justice Society. “We were searching for a professional artist to join our board and discovered Kelly through board Vice Chair Priscilla Ocen. Kelly’s background in connecting the arts to the community will be a tremendous asset to us.”
“Michael and I used to work together at the Lawyers’ Committee and we most recently worked together on a historic implicit bias-related settlement with the Antioch (Calif.) school district,” said Eva. “With our expanding legal work on discrimination against Black and Brown students, Michael’s subject matter expertise will help guide us to even more success taking down the school-to-prison pipeline.”
Kelly McCreary portrays Dr. Maggie Pierce in ABC’s hit series, “Grey’s Anatomy.” A native of Milwaukee, Wis., she began her professional acting career upon graduation from Barnard College. She has appeared on stages throughout the country and New York City, as well as in commercials, television and film.
Kelly has had the opportunity to live out her artistic mission of giving voice to unheard stories of unseen peoples throughout her career, including such productions as the Kennedy Center National Tour of “Color Me Dark,” Dominique Morriseau’s “Follow Me to Nellie’s,” Broadway’s “Passing Strange,” and “Caroline, or Change” at Centerstage in Baltimore.
Kelly is an associate member of IAMA Theater in Los Angeles; a founding member of Jaradoa Theater, a company committed to community outreach in New York City; and an associate artist with The Civilians, a theater company that creates new work based on creative investigation into vital questions of the present.
Michael Harris is a Senior Attorney in Juvenile Justice at the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL). At NCYL, Michael has worked on reducing racial disparities in statewide juvenile corrections systems, and he has worked on cases that challenge the “school-to-prison pipeline” in Texas and California.
Additionally Michael works on litigation to address implicit bias, and he has delivered presentations to local and national gatherings on the role implicit bias plays in decision-making within the juvenile justice system.
Before joining NCYL, Michael served as Deputy Director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute in San Francisco, working to reform juvenile justice systems. Michael has worked in California, and Washington to reduce racial disparities in the juvenile justice system using a collaborative process to affect systemic reform. Prior to Michael’s work at the Burns Institute, he was a Staff Attorney and Assistant Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco where he worked on a broad range of civil rights cases.