Cierra Kaler-Jones

Communities for Just Schools Fund Director of Storytelling

Cierra Kaler-Jones, Ph.D. is the first-ever Executive Director of Rethinking Schools. She is on the Zinn Education Project leadership team and serves on the Steering Committee for Black Lives Matter at School. Cierra is an educator, dancer, writer, professor, researcher, and narrative strategist. As an educator for over 12 years, she continues to teach dance and supports youth organizers in Washington, D.C. as the co-facilitator of the Seeding Disruption Remix youth fellowship program. She also runs a program called Black Girls S.O.A.R. (Scholarship, Organizing, Arts, and Resistance), which trains and supports Black girls in using arts-based research to fuel social change. Her research can be found in Middle School Journal,The Urban Review, Girlhood Studies, Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity, and Frontiers in Education. She’s given over 500 invited talks, keynotes, and workshops at convenings such as TEDxFoggyBottom, SXSW and SXSW EDU, Council for Exceptional Children, the Women’s Convention, and more. Dr. Kaler-Jones is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University and George Mason University. In 2022, Kaler-Jones was named to Black Enterprise’s 40 Under 40 list for her education and storytelling work.