Urvashi Vaid

Respected attorney and organizer for the GLBTQ movement

Urvashi Vaid is executive director of the Arcus Foundation, a private grantmaking foundation that supports lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights and conservation of the world’s great apes, with offices in Kalamazoo, Mich., New York City and Cambridge, UK.  

Widely recognized for her work as a strategist and leader for gay rights and social justice organizations, Urvashi is an attorney and community organizer who has worked in the LGBT movement for more than two decades.

Prior to her role at Arcus, Vaid served as the deputy director of the Governance and Civil Society Unit of the Ford Foundation’s Peace and Social Justice Program.  She is a former executive director of  National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,  and started her legal career as a staff attorney for the ACLU's National Prison Project.  

Vaid is the author of "Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation," an analysis of the gay rights movement, which received the American Library Association's 1996 Gay Nonfiction Book award and was a finalist for the 1996 Lambda Literary Award. She is co-editor of "Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights" (St. Martins 2000), a collection of essays on the contemporary GLBT movement's recent policy victories. Vaid's speeches and articles have been published in alternative and mainstream publications, including Gay Community News, The Nation, The Advocate, The Stranger, Trikone, and The New Republic.

She has won numerous awards and accolades, including: Community Service Award from the American Foundation for AIDS Research; The Advocate magazine's 1991 Woman of the Year; and was named one of TIME magazine's fifty key leaders under forty.

Vaid currently serves on the Board of the Gill Foundation, and volunteers for different grassroots organizations and projects.  Vaid is a graduate of Vassar College and Northeastern University School of Law.