Rebecca Williams (she/her) is a writer, professor, and artist who studies how technology undermines or supports self-determination, interdependence, care, and collective freedom. Her work moves between practice, critique, and imagination, using writing, teaching, and art to examine what technology makes possible, obscures, and normalizes.
She is currently the Director of Strategy for the Privacy & Data Governance unit at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she advises on privacy-by-design practices that support organizers and ACLU affiliates across the country. Before focusing on privacy, Rebecca spent a decade advancing transparency to hold government accountable, working at the Sunlight Foundation, Data.gov, and the White House Office of Management and Budget. She continues that work as a board member of MuckRock, a nonprofit platform for government transparency and public records journalism.
She teaches at Pratt Institute as a Visiting Assistant Professor, where her course Information and Human Rights explores how law, technology, and culture structure access, governance, and self-determination. She has been a Technology and Public Purpose Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and an advisor to the Surveillance Resistance Lab, with writing published in Tech Policy Press, Wired, The New Republic, and MIT Technology Review.
Outside of policy, Rebecca is an emerging painter and visual artist whose work explores technology and governance through myths, symbols, saturated color, messy marks, recursion, and inside jokes. Painting and self-aware web work offer a way back to emotion, intuition, and what it means to be human.
She holds a B.A. in Communication and Film from the University of Massachusetts and a J.D. from Western New England University School of Law. She is admitted to the New York Bar and was named one of the American Bar Association’s “10 Women to Watch in Legal Tech.”
Rebecca lives in New York City with her dog, Hannah Arendt. For more information, see her CV.