Kayla Vinson (she/her) is the inaugural Executive Director of the Law and Racial Justice Center, and she co-teaches the Access to Law School courses. After graduating from Yale College, Kayla got her teaching license, and then taught middle and high school social studies/history. Before joining the YLS community, she worked as an attorney in Montgomery, Alabama, where her docket included appellate and post-conviction legal representation, reentry support, memory work on the legacy of racial injustice in the United States, curriculum development for middle and high schools, and research and writing about the function of white supremacy in the criminal legal system. She has also worked to create and support antiracist, liberatory educational settings.
Kayla’s work investigates how the afterlife of chattel slavery mediates life, opportunity, development, and underdevelopment in the United States so that we might build an otherwise world. She holds degrees in African American Studies and Sociology from Yale College, Secondary Education from the University of Pennsylvania (M.S.Ed), and Policy Affairs from Princeton University (M.P.A.), and she is a graduate of New York University School of Law.