Bettina L. Love, Ph.D.

Bettina L. Love, Ph.D. is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and the bestselling author of We Want to Do More Than Survive and the new 2023 book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 Leaders making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate.

Dr. Love is a co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN), whose mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities. The ATN has granted over $250,000 to abolitionists around the country. She is also a founding member of the task force that launched the program In Her Hands, distributing more than $15 million to Black women living in Georgia. In Her Hands is one of the largest guaranteed income pilot programs in the U.S.

Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including abolitionist teaching, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations, and art-based education to foster youth civic engagement. For her work in the field of Hip Hop education, in 2016, Dr. Love was named the Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. In April of 2017, Dr. Love participated in a one-on-one public lecture with late feminist icon, bell hooks, focused on the liberatory education practices of Black and Brown children. In 2018, Georgia’s House of Representatives presented Dr. Love with a resolution for her impact on the field of education. She has also provided commentary for various news outlets including NPR, PBS, Ed Week, The Guardian, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.