Mia Birdsong is rewriting what it means to get free. Blending scholarship, journalism, and cultural meaning-making, she does critical work to reconnect us with forgotten wisdom and train our attention on the ideas and practices we need to live in the world we know is possible. With her eyes on the future, Mia has spent decades interrogating false ideas and proposing new visions of who and how we can be with each other.
Author of How We Show Up and founding Executive Director of Next River, a think tank and culture change lab for interconnected freedom, Mia’s curiosity is contagious. Her research and writing, like the recent Freedom’s Revival: Research from the Headwaters of Liberation, redefine how we understand fundamental ideas like “freedom” and “community” and demand that we refocus our attention on the beauty and brilliance beyond the status quo.
Mia puts the perspective of people experiencing oppression at the center of her work and reshapes our collective understanding of what’s true, whether in her podcast series More Than Enough to her TED talk on The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn’t True or her previous role as co-executive director of Family Story.
Mia is rooting for everybody with a perspective deeply rooted in Black feminism, abolition, and disability justice. Mia is a Senior Fellow of the Economic Security Project and aFuture Good Fellow at Institute For the Future. She was an inaugural Ascend Fellow of The Aspen Institute, and a New American California Fellow.
