Who is Donna Brazile?

Donna Brazile, keynote speaker for the 2011 breakfast, is a political activist, educator, and writer.

Staff Reports

Donna Brazile is the founder and managing director of Brazile & Associates LLC, a general consulting, grassroots advocacy, and training firm based in Washington, DC. She began her political career at the age of nine, when she worked to elect a City Council candidate who had promised to build a playground in her New Orleans neighborhood. The candidate won, the swing sets were installed, and her lifelong passion for progressive political activism was ignited.

Her volunteer efforts led to a career as a highly regarded professional political advisor and strategist. From 1976 to 2000, Ms. Brazile worked on every presidential campaign, culminating in her service as manager of former Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign, the first African American woman to do so.

The former chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights
Institute, she currently serves as the DNC Vice Chair of Voter
Registration and Participation. She is also an on-air contributor to CNN
and ABC, where she regularly appears on “This Week with Christiane
Amanpour,” and writes for United Media, Ms. Magazine, and O, the Oprah
Magazine.

Author of the best-selling memoir Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots
in American Politics, Ms. Brazile is also an adjunct professor at
Georgetown University, and in August 2009 Ms. Brazile was named one of
twenty “remarkable visionaries” by O, The Oprah Magazine. She has also
been awarded the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s highest award
for political achievement.

A former member of the board of directors of the Louisiana Recovery
Authority, the organization responsible for leading the state’s
rebuilding process in the aftermath of two catastrophic hurricanes, Ms.
Brazile has received honorary doctorates from Louisiana State University
and Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically black
Catholic institution of higher education in the United States.

Throughout her career in politics and now in her public and private
life, Ms. Brazile remains dedicated to the passion that has guided her
throughout her life: encouraging young people to vote, to work within
the system to strengthen it, and to run for public office.