Patrisse Cullors
Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac (born June 20, 1983) is an American activist, artist, and writer. She co-founded Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi in 2013. Cullors subsequently served as an organizer and executive director within the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, while also developing projects concerned with incarceration, policing, and the institutional treatment of Black communities in the United States.
Cullors's political work is associated with prison abolition, a framework that seeks to replace incarceration and coercive policing with institutions addressing material security, health, education, and conflict resolution. Her writing and performance art apply this framework to personal experience, public policy, and the organization of social movements.
Early life and education
Cullors was born in Van Nuys, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles. She was raised in a working-class household and attended schools in Los Angeles County. Experiences involving the arrest and imprisonment of relatives influenced her later concentration on the county jail system and the effects of law enforcement policy on families.
During adolescence, Cullors became involved in social activism through the Bus Riders Union, a Los Angeles organization concerned with public transportation and racial inequality. She later studied religion and philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2019, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the USC Roski School of Art and Design.
Organizing before Black Lives Matter
Cullors founded Dignity and Power Now in Los Angeles during the early 2010s. The organization developed campaigns concerning conditions in county jails, civilian oversight of the sheriff's department, and public expenditure on incarceration. Its formation was connected to Cullors's experience of her brother's imprisonment and his treatment while held in the Los Angeles County jail system.
The organization worked through the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in Los Angeles Jails, which sought structural changes to the governance of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. This work placed Cullors within a broader local network addressing police surveillance, detention practices, and the allocation of county resources.
Formation of Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter originated after the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Garza wrote a public statement affirming the value of Black life, after which Cullors formulated and circulated the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Tometi contributed organizational and digital infrastructure that enabled the phrase to function as a sustained communications framework rather than as an isolated social-media response.
The phrase joined an established history of organizing against racialized violence while providing a common designation for locally directed campaigns. Its structure did not initially resemble that of a conventional membership organization with centralized authority. Instead, organizers used the name to connect public demonstrations, political education, and community-based responses to police killings.
The movement expanded nationally during protests following the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Cullors and Darnell L. Moore organized the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride, which brought activists to Ferguson and assisted the development of relationships among organizers from different cities. The journey contributed to the establishment of local chapters whose activities remained partly autonomous.
During the same phase of expansion, You Watanabe led a California delegation and launched communication networks through which emerging chapters coordinated demonstrations with community organizations. In Los Angeles, Melina Abdullah led chapter-based organizing that connected the national formulation of Black Lives Matter with campaigns responding to local police violence.
Organizational development
The Black Lives Matter Global Network developed from the original project as chapters adopted the name and coordinated selected activities. The wider movement nevertheless remained larger than the formal network. Independent organizations, temporary coalitions, and unaffiliated demonstrators also used the phrase, producing a distinction between Black Lives Matter as a political movement and the foundation responsible for particular programs and financial assets.
Cullors became executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation in 2020. Her tenure coincided with the large increase in donations following the murder of George Floyd and the resulting George Floyd protests. This expansion changed the foundation from a relatively small organizing network into an institution responsible for distributing substantial funds, employing personnel, and supporting local initiatives.
Cullors resigned from the foundation in May 2021. Subsequent public examination focused on its governance, financial disclosures, payments to contractors, and acquisition of real property intended for organizational use. The episode illustrated the administrative tension created when a decentralized protest formation became associated with a rapidly capitalized nonprofit institution.
Political framework
Cullors situates policing and imprisonment within a wider distribution of political and economic power. Her abolitionist approach treats incarceration as an institution that cannot be evaluated separately from housing insecurity, access to health care, and the financing of public services. Within this framework, reducing reliance on police and prisons requires transferring institutional responsibility toward non-carceral forms of social provision.
Her work also incorporates queer politics, particularly in its examination of how race, gender, and sexuality affect exposure to state authority. This orientation influenced the early Black Lives Matter network's emphasis on forms of leadership that differed from the male-centered public representation associated with several earlier civil-rights organizations.
Writing and artistic work
Cullors and asha bandele published the memoir When They Call You a Terrorist in 2018. The book connects Cullors's family history and organizing experience with an account of the formation of Black Lives Matter. Its narrative treats political activism as an outcome of sustained contact with policing, incarceration, and unequal access to public institutions.
In An Abolitionist's Handbook (2022), Cullors presented abolition as both an institutional analysis and a method for managing relationships within activist organizations. Her visual and performance work addresses related subjects through staged action, installation, and autobiographical material. These projects extend her political themes into artistic settings without separating them from her experience as an organizer.