Press kit

Julie Wenah is a civil rights lawyer and technologist who works on how AI and biometric systems get measured, governed, and held accountable. She took a Bachelor of Science in Political Science from Lamar University, a law degree from Texas Southern University, a master’s from Georgetown and a certificate from Harvard Law School Executive Education, and was admitted to the Texas Bar in 2013.

Her government and technology careers began together. In 2009 she was a Legal Fellow at NASA’s URC Center for Bionanotechnology, supporting experiments that flew on the STS-129 shuttle mission. She went on to the Obama White House, where she vetted nominees for presidential boards and commissions and worked in the Office of the First Lady, and to the Department of Commerce as Counselor and Policy Advisor, contributing to the Administration’s 2014 Big Data report. She was later appointed to the FCC’s Communications Equity and Diversity Council, co-chairing the Innovation and Access Working Group.

At Airbnb she was Community Senior Counsel and Acting Regional Counsel for Africa, and designed the governance for Project Lighthouse, the award-winning system built with civil rights organizations to measure racial gaps in bookings without storing perceived race next to anyone’s identity. At Meta she was Associate General Counsel and Product & Accessibility Lead for Civil Rights, designing the governance for race data measurement and creating Project Height, an equity framework for product teams named for Dorothy Height. She was a named expert contributor to the Partnership on AI’s 2023 paper Eyes Off My Data.

She chairs the Digital Civil Rights Coalition and is building a company that helps product teams catch discrimination risk before launch. She has spoken at the White House, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Ghana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the University of Tokyo and the National Bar Association.