Ellen Liu is a feminist, human rights activist, and writer. Born in New York City to Taiwanese immigrants, she is passionate about building social movements to create a safer, more just world for women and girls. Ellen has deep expertise, professional and lived, in the reproductive justice movement, and has been involved in philanthropic efforts to support health equity and reproductive freedom for nearly two decades. She is a reproductive justice activist, a breast cancer survivor, an abortion, pregnancy, and infant loss doula-in-training, and an infertility peer support counselor. As an intersectional feminist, Ellen strives to use her voice and power to amplify and unite the often invisible stories of health inequity and reproductive injustice. She is currently writing a memoir about her experience surviving birth, death, and the multiple losses in between.
Ellen directs funding and resources to frontline grassroots organizations that are fighting for reproductive justice, birth justice, economic justice, safety from violence and criminalization, and are pushing the boundaries of our status quo society to end systemic racism and gender discrimination. Previously, Ellen was a grantmaker at the Open Society Foundations. Ellen lives in the Washington DC area is the proud mom of a young bi-racial son.