Suzannah Phillips

Director of Strategy at Women Enabled International

Suzannah Phillips is the Director of Strategy at Women Enabled International. In this capacity, Suzannah works in close collaboration with WEI’s Executive Director to develop and implement WEI’s next multi-year strategic plan, in addition to providing top-level strategic guidance to the Program team to ensure our programmatic work advances our strategic priorities.

Suzannah brings to this role almost 20 years of experience with intersectional human rights advocacy. Since joining WEI in 2015, Suzannah has played an integral role in designing and leading WEI’s groundbreaking strategies to advance human rights at the intersection of gender and disability. Most recently, as the Interim Executive Director, she led WEI through its transition from its founding Executive Director to position the organization to successfully welcome in new leadership.

Suzannah’s staunch commitment to gender justice has been a guiding force throughout her career. Suzannah was previously the Legal Adviser for International Advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), where she engaged in international and regional advocacy to strengthen reproductive rights standards and documented and litigated forced sterilization of Chilean women living with HIV. As Clinical Fellow with the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic at CUNY School of Law, Suzannah led a project addressing the unjust criminalization of individuals who were trafficked into the sex trade. Suzannah has also provided direct services to survivors of gender-based violence and helped litigate Jessica Lenahan (Gonzales) v. the United States before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Suzannah graduated cum laude from Harvard University and received her J.D. from Columbia Law School. At Columbia, Suzannah was a teaching assistant for the Human Rights Clinic, the Editor-in-Chief of the Spanish Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual (a publication of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review), and a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar.