Suzannah Phillips

Strategy Director 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 for the development and implementation WEI’s strategic plan, providing top-level strategic guidance across the organization to ensure coherence and consistency with our strategic priorities. Suzannah is also responsible for the design, implementation, and evaluation of WEI’s concerted efforts to better understand the broader landscape in which WEI is implementing its strategic plan and to monitor and evaluate the impact of its work to support the organization to deepen its reach and impact at the global, regional, and national levels, inform the long-term vision for the organization, and influence key changemakers to foster an ecosystem that is more conducive to advancing human rights at the intersection of gender and disability.

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. Prior to taking on the Strategy Director role, Suzannah served as the Interim Executive Director to lead WEI through its transition from its founding Executive Director and 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.