Dr. Laura J. Ramírez holds a doctorate in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A Spanish teacher by training, she has over 17 years of experience as a teacher educator, human rights organizer, curriculum creator, cultural worker, writer, and high school teacher in the Chicagoland area. Her work to advance a quality public education for all children at the local, national, and international levels spans the gamut of grassroots organizing, policy advocacy, collective responses to injustice, community building and healing, and radical acts of resistance.

All her work is trauma-informed and healing-centered and involves embodied eco-pedagogies. She has co-founded several organizing and mutual aid projects, including the Justicia en Ayotzinapa Comite Chicago and the North Lawndale Mutual Aid Group. She also founded Instituto Gaspar Yanga (IGY) to develop a holistic model for teacher and educator preparation that fosters social, emotional, spiritual and intellectual development. At IGY, Dr. Ramírez has created community-based programs to share the methodology of Testimonio as a tool for BIPOC and LGBTQI people from underserved communities to record their lived experiences as historical documentation of local and personal histories of both oppression and resistance.