Djamila Ribeiro is a public intellectual.
Trained in Philosophy and holding a master’s degree in Political Philosophy from the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Ribeiro coordinates Feminismos Plurais, an initiative that encompasses the Espaço Feminismos Plurais—an institute dedicated to the support and education of women in situations of social vulnerability in São Paulo—and the Feminismos Plurais Collection, devoted to publishing Black authors in Brazil and abroad.
She is the author of Lugar de Fala (Where We Stand), Who Is Afraid of Black Feminism?, Small Anti-Racist Manual, and Letters to My Grandmother, as well as Transatlantic Dialogues and Crossings, with works translated into several languages.
Ribeiro has been a visiting professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) and at New York University (NYU), and has delivered keynote lectures and courses at universities in multiple countries. She is currently a visiting professor in the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholars Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), becoming the first Brazilian in history to hold this position.
She is a recipient of the Prince Claus Award, granted by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and was selected by the BBC as one of the 100 most influential women in the world. In 2020, she received the Jabuti Prize in the Humanities category for Small Anti-Racist Manual.
She served as Deputy Secretary for Human Rights of the city of São Paulo in 2016. In 2023, she was awarded the Franco-German Human Rights Prize and, in the same year, became the first civilian in the country’s history to address the United Nations General Assembly.
She holds seat no. 28 at the São Paulo Academy of Letters and serves as a board member of the Padre Anchieta Foundation, the Pinacoteca of São Paulo, and the USP Endowment Fund. She is a weekly columnist for Folha de S.Paulo.
PROFESSIONAL MEMOIR (2018-2024)
Djamila Ribeiro in Belo Horizonte. Photo: Luciano Vianna/SESC
Djamila Ribeiro’s intellectual and public trajectory has direct roots in formative experiences that connect critical thought, collective action, and cultural life. As a young woman in Santos (São Paulo), Djamila had decisive contact with Black women authors and with the tradition of Black Brazilian feminism by attending, beginning in 1999, the Casa de Cultura da Mulher Negra de Santos—a historic space for political organizing, knowledge production, and cultural formation, then led by the poet and activist Dona Alzira Rufino.
In the 2000s, Djamila worked as a teacher in Educafro’s network of community-based preparatory courses, supporting the education of young people from the Baixada Santista and deepening her involvement in popular education. In 2008, at age 27, she enrolled in the Philosophy undergraduate program at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), beginning an academic path that, from the outset, engaged organically with her activist, pedagogical, and intellectual experience, always oriented toward democratizing access to knowledge.
Djamila completed her undergraduate degree and, in 2015, earned her MA in Political Philosophy. The following year, in 2016, she assumed the position of Deputy Secretary of Human Rights for the City of São Paulo, a role she held until the end of that administration, participating in the design and implementation of public policies aimed at advancing rights and reducing inequalities.
In November 2017, she launched in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro the book O que é Lugar de Fala?—a work that would later be titled Lugar de Fala. The launch events drew thousands of people in their very first appearances. In Minas Gerais, during the third presentation of the book, held at Sesc Palladium in Belo Horizonte, Djamila broke the auditorium’s attendance record, unequivocally signaling the impact and power of her intellectual production in Brazil’s public debate.
From this milestone onward, this memoir details the consolidation of her trajectory as a public intellectual, author, professor, editor, and creator of cultural, educational, and institutional projects with national and international reach.
PUBLISHED BOOKS
With Lugar de Fala and as the coordinator of the Feminismos Plurais Book Series, Djamila Ribeiro has led, over recent years, one of the most significant transformations in Brazil’s contemporary publishing market. By publishing nonfiction works written by Black authors—addressing critical themes such as racism, feminism, democracy, and knowledge production—in accessible language, didactic format, and at affordable prices, the series broke long-standing barriers to reading and public debate. Distributed through cultural launches, schools, universities, and community events, the books—small in format yet central in impact—became a circulation phenomenon, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and projecting Black Brazilian feminist authors and ideas beyond national borders.
With Companhia das Letras, Djamila is the author of three books. The first, Quem Tem Medo do Feminismo Negro? (2018), brings together texts published over the years in her column at CartaCapital and became a recurring presence on bestseller lists, in addition to being incorporated into educational materials for elementary and secondary schools across different school systems.
In November 2019, she published Pequeno Manual Antirracista, the most far-reaching work of her editorial trajectory. The book was Brazil’s best-selling title in 2020 and remained for more than 100 consecutive weeks on Veja magazine’s bestseller list. Across 11 chapters, it proposes antiracist awareness and action in multiple spheres of social life and includes a glossary dedicated to Black authors.
Published in 2021, Cartas para Minha Avó is Djamila’s third book with Companhia. It is a memoir in the form of letters addressed to her grandmother Antônia. The work revisits childhood, adolescence, and the challenges of adult life and, since its release, has appeared on bestseller lists, expanding the affective and literary reach of her work.
Diálogos Transatlânticos is her fifth book and brings together conversations between Djamila Ribeiro and Nadia Yala Kisukidi, professor at Université Paris 8. Published in 2020, it is available exclusively in France, in French, by Éditions Anacaona. In Brazil, the rights belong to Editora Bazar do Tempo, which produced—together with Paula Anacaona—the encounters between the authors.
Her sixth and most recent book, Travessias, was published in Portugal by Editorial Caminho (Grupo LeYa). The book gathers a selection of columns written by Djamila for Folha de S.Paulo, published between 2019 and 2020, a period of intense political, social, and cultural debate in Brazil. The volume includes an original introduction written especially for Portuguese readers, building bridges between Brazilian experiences and the contemporary challenges faced by democracies in the Lusophone world.
Djamila and Chimamanda in Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Bel Acosta
IMPACT AND CIRCULATION OF HER WORK
One of the most emblematic moments of her institutional trajectory took place on September 1, 2022, when she was inducted into Seat No. 28 of the Academia Paulista de Letras, succeeding the writer Lygia Fagundes Telles. The ceremony, held at Largo do Arouche, brought together a diverse public and included the presence of the author’s terreiro community, which conducted rites with atabaque drumming. The welcoming address was delivered by writer Leandro Karnal. With this induction, Djamila became the second Black woman in the institution’s history to hold a seat—following Ruth Guimarães—and also the youngest among the Academy’s contemporary members.
Her books are included in countless undergraduate and graduate course bibliographies in Brazil. A bibliometric survey conducted by me and Brenda Vieira, aimed at measuring the academic impact of Lugar de Fala, identified more than one thousand references to the work in master’s dissertations and doctoral theses produced in the country. Beyond academic circulation, her works are taught in classrooms, pedagogical materials, language schools, and selection processes, appearing on entrance-exam reading lists of institutions such as Fuvest and Unicamp, and forming part of the mandatory Philosophy bibliography at the Federal University of Paraná.
Her popular reach is also evident at literary fairs and events throughout the country, with lines of thousands of people for book signings in cities such as Salvador, Belém, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Fortaleza, Teresina, Rio Branco, Curitiba, Natal, Bonito, Ribeirão Preto, Bauru, and Palmas, among many others.
In 2024, she was the honored author of FLISOL (Festa Literária da Morada do Sol) in Araraquara, curated by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão. In 2025, she was the honored author of the Ribeirão Preto International Book Fair, on which occasion she also became an honorary citizen of Ribeirão Preto.
In 2025, combining sales in Brazil and internationally, her publications reached 1 million copies sold.
Beyond her own books, Djamila also stands out for forewords that have shaped the circulation of foundational works in Brazil. Among them is the foreword to Women, Race & Class, by Angela Davis—whose translation and publication in Brazil were made possible after direct contact initiated by Djamila in 2015, resulting in the edition released in 2016. She also wrote other highly relevant forewords, such as the catalog for Grada Kilomba’s exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, dedicated to an anticolonial rereading of Greek myths.
Djamila wrote the foreword to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou (an edition that also includes a foreword by Oprah Winfrey), and the foreword to The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, an invitation that stemmed from her curation for the TAG Livros book club.
Over the years, she has participated in international encounters with intellectuals and leaders such as Alice Walker, Achille Mbembe, Ruby Bridges, Kalaf Epalanga, Mamadou Ba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Oprah Winfrey. In 2022, at the Salão Carioca do Livro, she moderated Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk in a packed Maracanãzinho arena, with tickets selling out within minutes—an encounter that symbolizes the public, affective, and transnational dimension of her intellectual work.
DJAMILA RIBEIRO AND THE FEMINISMOS PLURAIS BOOK SERIES
The Feminismos Plurais Book Series, conceived and coordinated by Djamila Ribeiro, has become an indispensable collective project for raising Brazilian society’s awareness of contemporary antiracist and feminist perspectives. Over its trajectory, the series not only expanded access to fundamental debates about democracy, race, gender, and power, but also revolutionized Brazil’s publishing market by enabling large-scale publication of nonfiction works produced by Black authors, with theoretical rigor, accessible language, and strong social engagement.
Between 2019 and 2025, the Feminismos Plurais Book Series resulted from the partnership between Djamila Ribeiro and Editora Jandaíra, led by publisher Lizandra Magon. In that period, 14 titles were published – six reissues and eight new works. This phase of the series includes: Lugar de Fala (Djamila Ribeiro); Encarceramento em Massa (Juliana Borges); Empoderamento (Joice Berth); Racismo Estrutural (Silvio Almeida); Interseccionalidade (Carla Akotirene); Racismo Recreativo (Adilson Moreira); Apropriação Cultural (Rodney William); Intolerância Religiosa (Sidnei Barreto); Colorismo (Alessandra Devulsky); Transfeminismo (Letícia Nascimento); Trabalho Doméstico (Juliana Teixeira); Discurso de Ódio nas Redes Sociais (Luiz Valério Trindade); Cotas Raciais (Lívia Sant’Anna Vaz); and Lesbiandade (Deise Fatumma).
The series established itself as a central agent in democratizing access to critical thought in Brazil and repositioned the axis of intellectual legitimacy within the publishing market, opening paths for other Black voices to be published, read, and recognized on a national scale. In 2026, the Feminismos Plurais Book Series and Lugar de Fala begin to be published by Grupo Editorial Record, through the Rosa dos Tempos imprint, under the editorship of Lívia Vianna. In this new phase, Lugar de Fala will be reissued in an expanded edition, scheduled for release in March 2026, reaffirming its centrality to Brazil’s public debate and the editorial vitality of the work nearly a decade after its original publication.
Record also plans to reissue most of the series’ titles, as well as publish new works, including: Direitos Sexuais e Reprodutivos (Marjorie Chaves), Saúde Mental (Ana Luísa Coelho), and Transmasculinidades (Gabriel Romão).
The transformations promoted by Djamila Ribeiro’s editorial work and by the Feminismos Plurais Book Series are already the subject of academic and historical reflection. The hundreds of thousands of copies sold do not represent commercial success alone; they indicate a structural shift in Brazilian literary culture, especially regarding the circulation of ideas produced by Black authors.
According to a study by researcher Regina Dalcastagnè (University of Brasília), between 1964 and 2014 only about 10% of books published by major Brazilian publishers were written by Black authors. The emergence and consolidation of the Feminismos Plurais Book Series is directly part of the rupture with that landscape, helping to expand the presence of Black authors in Brazil’s national publishing market.
Internationally, Djamila’s editorial work—as author and coordinator—crossed the Atlantic and took firm root in Europe. Through partnerships with publishers in France, Italy, and Spain, series titles have been translated and published in different languages: in French by Éditions Anacaona (with translations of works by Joice Berth, Adilson Moreira, Rodney William, Alessandra Devulsky, Letícia Nascimento, Deise Fatumma, and Lívia Sant’Anna Vaz); in Spanish, with the translation of Encarceramento em Massa (Juliana Borges); and in Italy, by Capovolte Edizioni, with translations of Interseccionalidade (Carla Akotirene) and Discurso de Ódio nas Redes Sociais (Luiz Valério Trindade), a work that received a specific adaptation for the Italian debate.
As part of the editorial partnership with Paula Anacaona, between 2019 and early 2026, the Feminismos Plurais Book Series funded book tours in France and Belgium for authors in the series, covering travel, lodging, and circulation. On some occasions, the work also included institutional and brand partnerships, such as Accor and Air France, expanding the international presence of Black Brazilian feminist thought.
Foto: Cassia Tabatini
EDITORIAL WORK (IMPRINTS AND EDITORIAL PROJECTS)
In partnership with Editora Jandaíra, led by publisher Lizandra Magon, Djamila Ribeiro coordinates the Sueli Carneiro Imprint, an editorial initiative dedicated to publishing foundational works of Black Brazilian thought. As editor of the imprint, she published Sueli Carneiro: escritos de uma vida, by Sueli Carneiro herself. The launch, held at SESC Pompeia, brought together the author’s family members, researchers, and emblematic figures of Brazil’s Black movement.
The imprint’s second title was Ó Paí, Prezada: racismo e sexismo tomando bonde nas penitenciárias femininas, by Carla Akotirene, based on her MA dissertation at the Federal University of Bahia. In November 2020, the imprint published its third book, Mulheres Quilombolas, organized by Selma Dealdina, bringing together texts by eighteen women from different quilombola communities across the country, with support from CONAQ (the National Coordination for the Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities).
In September 2021, the Sueli Carneiro Imprint released its first translation: Black Power, by the activist born in Trinidad and Tobago and based in the United States, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). The Brazilian edition includes a foreword by his son, Bokar Ture, and recovers a central work of the civil rights movement in the 20th century, responsible for consolidating the concept of “institutional racism.”
Still in 2021, through a public call supported by entrepreneur Maurício Rocha, the imprint published Uma nova história, feita de histórias: personalidades negras invisibilizadas da História do Brasil, bringing together 16 essays by Black researchers from different regions of the country, dedicated to recovering trajectories erased from national history.
In 2022, the imprint released Educação quilombola: territorialidades, saberes e as lutas por direitos, gathering texts produced from the 1st National Virtual Conference on Quilombola Education, held in partnership between the University of Brasília and CONAQ.
In October 2022, it published A resistência negra ao projeto de exclusão racial – Brasil 200 anos (1822–2022), organized by Hélio Santos. The volume brings together 18 essays by historic figures of the Black Brazilian movement—such as Kabengele Munanga, Sueli Carneiro, Cida Bento, and Ana Maria Gonçalves—reflecting on Brazil’s Independence bicentennial from a Black perspective. Djamila Ribeiro contributed the essay A urgente democratização das mídias: uma abordagem gaspariana.
In 2023, the editorial initiative coordinated by Djamila published the translation of Águas de Estuário, by Colombian writer Vélia Vidal, an epistolary work about life in Chocó, a predominantly Black region of Colombia. Djamila and Vélia met at Hay Festival Cartagena (2021), and the Brazilian edition marked the beginning of an editorial project focused on translating and publishing women from the Global South.
As Florencia Ferrari, director of Editora Ubu, noted in an interview with O Globo: “When Djamila cites Audre Lorde or other incredible Black authors—whether fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or theater—publishers go after them.”
In June 2024, Djamila Ribeiro was announced as coordinator of the Global South Feminisms Imprint, to be published by Grupo Editorial Record under the Rosa dos Tempos imprint. The collection announced Feminismo Dalit as its first title, a work by Indian scholars who develop feminist critique from the experience of Dalit women within the caste system, broadening the project’s transnational horizon.
WORK ABROAD (ACADEMIC AND INSTITUTIONAL TRAJECTORY)
As an undergraduate, Djamila presented papers at conferences of the Beauvoir Society, dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir’s thought, and lectured at two conferences: in Oregon (United States) and in St. Louis (United States), as a master’s student. After completing her MA, she delivered lectures at dozens of universities around the world, including Berkeley, Duke, Harvard, King’s College, the London School of Economics, and universities in Montpellier, Lyon, Toulouse, Rennes, Aarhus, Oslo, and Amsterdam, among others.
In 2018, she delivered a lecture in the “Angela Davis Chair for visiting professors” at Goethe University (Germany). In 2019, she was a researcher at Maxcy College at the invitation of the University of South Carolina, and she is a visiting researcher at the University of Mainz (Germany). She has also taken part in book fairs such as Frankfurt, Berlin, Edinburgh, Nairobi, Bogotá, Brussels, and Arequipa, among others. Djamila has also spoken at institutions such as UNESCO, the World Bank, and foreign parliaments.
In 2023, she was a keynote speaker at the UN General Assembly on the International Day of Remembrance of the Abolition of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, delivering a speech on “Fighting the enslaving legacy of racism through transformative education.”
In terms of official agendas, in October 2017 she spent a week in Norway at the invitation of the Norwegian government, learning about and engaging with Norwegian public policy. In 2018, at the invitation of South Africa’s tourism authority, she spent a week in the country and, in the same year, received the UN’s Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD) award. In March 2019, she was selected for the French government’s “Personality of Tomorrow” program, which selects one person per country for a week of official engagements.
In 2019, she was named by the BBC as one of the 100 most influential women in the world and, at the end of the year, received the Prince Claus Award, granted by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in recognition of her work democratizing access to reading and her role as a public intellectual.
In 2020, she participated in a literary residency at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB), during which she produced an article under the guidance of Natasha Kelly for a work published in multiple languages. In 2021, she spoke at the Bundestag at the invitation of Claudia Roth, then Vice President of the German Parliament. In 2023, she met in São Paulo with Germany’s then Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock; and earlier that year, in Brasília, she was decorated with the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights in a ceremony attended by Minister of State Tobias Lindner and Minister Delegate Olivier Betch.
She was the main guest at the Women of Colour Festival and participated as a main guest at the Verbier Art Summit (Switzerland) in 2020. In 2021, she appeared in the programming of the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea) and was the honored writer of the Lima Book Fair (Peru). That same year, she became the first Brazilian person to receive the BET Awards, in the Global Good category, for the social impact of her work.
She has appeared on covers and in interviews in outlets such as the German taz, the Italian Corriere della Sera and Il Manifesto, the Dutch NRC, and the French Afrojeunesse, as well as in international newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times, and in agencies such as Reuters and AFP. She has taken part in programs and interviews on CGTN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. During the second half of 2021, she wrote a monthly column for the German magazine Der Spiegel.
At the end of 2023, she was in Washington as an honoree at the Inter-American Dialogue gala ball, held at the Organization of American States (OAS), a ceremony that also honored Guatemala’s president-elect Bernardo Arévalo.
INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS (BY COUNTRY)
France
France was the first country to translate and publish Djamila Ribeiro’s work, through Éditions Anacaona, a publishing house founded and directed by Paula Anacaona. Djamila and Anacaona established a strong and innovative working partnership. Through tours and trips to France and to Brussels (Belgium) for launch events, more than 15,000 copies were sold.
In 2025, Djamila delivered the opening session at the Saint-Malo Festival, France’s largest literary festival, to an audience of over 1,200 people. Over the years, she also visited Lyon, Toulouse, Montpellier, Lille, Rennes, and Marseille.
The following titles were published: La place de la parole noire (Lugar de Fala), Chroniques sur le féminisme noir (Quem Tem Medo do Feminismo Negro?), Petit manuel antiraciste et féministe (Pequeno Manual Antirracista), and Ta magie m’a menée jusqu’ici – Lettres à ma grand-mère (Cartas para Minha Avó). Djamila also published an article on motherhood and Candomblé in Gagner le monde (Éditions La Fabrique), a volume bringing together texts by feminists from different countries.
Djamila completed three tours in France, participating in debates, launches, and academic meetings alongside intellectuals such as Françoise Vergès, Maboula Soumahoro, Mame-Fatou Niang, and Aurélie Knüfer, as well as Nadia Yala Kisukidi, with whom she published Dialogue transatlantique: perspectives de la pensée féministe noire et des diasporas africaines, available exclusively in France.
United States
Djamila Ribeiro’s first writings in English began to appear in 2016, when she published “Black feminism for a new civilizatory framework” on the Conectas Human Rights website.
For a long time, at events she held in the country, Djamila would autograph that and other texts translated into English on the very sheets of paper they were printed on.
Many years passed like this until, in 2024, thanks to an article in The New York Times that highlighted Djamila as one of the leading agents of Brazil’s literary revolution, Where We Stand was published in the United States by Yale University Press. The book presents a translation and adaptation of Lugar de Fala for Anglophone readers, with an original introduction in which Djamila speaks directly to readers in the United States and other contexts. It was edited by Abbie Storch and translated by Padma Viswanathan.
A central element of the publication is the foreword by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In the section dedicated to Djamila’s time as a visiting professor at NYU, there is more information about the Where We Stand launch tour in the second half of 2024, which began with a debate promoted by Yale University’s department of racial studies, marking the book’s insertion into the North American academic and intellectual circuit.
In 2026, the book Gagner le monde was translated into English by Pluto Press and published under the title Feminism for the World.
Italy
In Italy, Djamila Ribeiro’s works have been published by Capovolte, under the editorial coordination of Ilaria Leccardi, since 2020. Titles released include Il luogo della parola (Lugar de Fala), Piccolo manuale antirazzista e femminista (Pequeno Manual Antirracista), and Lettere a mia nonna (Cartas para Minha Avó).
Djamila has completed two launch tours in the country, visiting Milan, Bologna, Naples, and Florence. In Rome, the Municipal Library could not accommodate the number of attendees, and half the audience watched from outside, looking through the windows. Djamila also participated in literary events such as the Turin International Book Fair and took part in university debates about her books, among other public engagements, alongside intellectuals and moderators such as Igiaba Scego, Johanne Affricot, Alessia Di Eugenio, and Nicola Biasio.
Mexico
In 2023, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in partnership with the Tumbalacasa imprint, published the Spanish translation of Lugar de Fala under the title Lugar de Enunciación, expanding the book’s circulation in the Latin American academic context.
Djamila visited the country on three occasions. The first time, taking advantage of her presence in Mexico City as a guest at a UNESCO conference, she launched the Spanish edition of Quem Tem Medo do Feminismo Negro?, published by the Chilean publisher Libros de la Mujer Rota, moderated by feminist Junko Ogata. It was an independently organized event, with partnership from the Prince Claus Fund and the “What Design Can Do?” initiative. The second time she returned for work, she was invited by UNAM as the main guest of the XXX International Colloquium on Gender Studies, moderated by Aleida Violeta Vázquez. The third time, she participated as a guest at the Guadalajara International Book Fair.
Portugal
In 2024, Editorial Caminho published the first translation of a Djamila Ribeiro work into European Portuguese, an editorial milestone led by Zeferino Coelho. One year earlier, Djamila was in Portugal for the Coimbra Book Fair and for the Gulbenkian Summer Gardens, where her participation broke historic audience records, requiring a live broadcast to additional rooms.
In 2024, already with Cartas para Minha Avó published in the country, Djamila once again filled the Lisbon Book Fair and was received at the José Saramago Foundation by Pilar del Río. In 2025, Editorial Caminho announced the first publication of Travessias, gathering articles published in the author’s column at Folha de S.Paulo, with an original introduction for the Portuguese edition.
Argentina
In 2024, Djamila held events in Buenos Aires on the occasion of the publication, in Spanish, of Pequeño Manual Antirracista and Cartas para mi abuela, released by the Mandacaru imprint in partnership with Tinta Limón, edited by Lucía Tennina. During the tour, she was invited for an exclusive launch at MALBA (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires) and was also the main guest of the Feria de Editores (FED).
In 2025, following contact from the publisher, she was invited to participate in the Guadalajara International Book Fair, consolidating her presence in the Latin American editorial and intellectual circuit.
South Africa
In 2025, Djamila was invited to deliver a public lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) in Johannesburg, with support from the Brazilian Embassy in Pretoria and the participation of Jonathan Ball Publishers, represented by Shakti India, responsible for title promotion and sales.
With this activity, Djamila became one of the first Brazilian authors of critical nonfiction to hold a structured editorial and academic event in South Africa. Based on a survey carried out with publishers, cultural institutions, and diplomatic representations, it is possible to state that, in the publishing-market field, this was the first book launch by a Brazilian woman writer in the country, marking a historic moment in the circulation of Brazilian intellectual production in the South African context.
Germany
In 2026, the publication of the translation of Pequeno Manual Antirracista is scheduled by the publisher W_orten & Meer. Between 2020 and 2024, Lugar de Fala was published by Editions Assemblage, with an original foreword by Grada Kilomba and translation by Inajá Correia Wittkowski. Over the years, Djamila has visited the country several times, including on two occasions at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Spain
In 2018, Djamila published her first academic article summarizing Lugar de Fala in a text for a journal at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Since 2024, she has been published in Spain by Txalaparta, which published Fue tu magia la que me trajo hasta aquí, with an in-person launch still to take place. Between 2018 and 2022, she was published by the now-defunct Ediciones Ambulantes, which released Lugar de Enunciación, the first Spanish translation of Lugar de Fala.
United Kingdom
In addition to Where We Stand also being published by Yale Press UK, it is important to highlight Djamila’s literary trajectory in the United Kingdom, which began in 2018, when she was one of 51 authors from 25 different countries invited by the Edinburgh Book Festival to publish in The Freedom Papers. Djamila’s article was “Freedom is a Collective Conscience Project.” In 2019, Djamila Ribeiro published a text with reflections on Amefricanidade, a political and cultural category developed by Lélia González, in a collection of essays published in the book Women Writers’s Handbook by Aurora Metro Books in 2020. Djamila also appears in an interview for the book Hairvolution, by the same publisher, in 2022.
Djamila Ribeiro e a senhora ministra das Relações Exteriores da França Catherine Colonna.
ESPAÇO FEMINISMOS PLURAIS
In April 2022, Djamila Ribeiro founded Espaço Feminismos Plurais, dedicated to the orixá Iansã and focused on holistic support for women. The Space offers free psychological, therapeutic, and dental care, as well as initiatives aimed at professionalizing women-led businesses, legal counseling, cultural events, and many other activities.
Among these actions, a key initiative is the partnership with the Rosângela Rigo shelter, focused on supporting women who are survivors of domestic violence and the shelter’s own workers, within the project Cuidando de quem cuida (“Caring for those who care”). The Space is located at Avenida Chibarás, 666, in Moema, in the South Zone of São Paulo, in a property donated for use by Maurício Rocha, the Space’s administrative director.
The property houses the Toni Morrison Library, with more than one thousand books available for consultation and computers available for use. Its façade was designed by Aline Bispo, who gifted Djamila an artwork dedicated to Black women and protection.
In 2024, Djamila Ribeiro and Rosilene Pimentel, director of Casa Rosângela Rigo, launched the booklet “Será que é amor?”, a free publication offering guidance on what constitutes violence against women, its different forms, and pathways to seek support and protection.
Over its first three years of operation, more than one thousand women have been served, and countless people have attended events and book launches held there. In 2023, the Space received a visit from the French Minister of Human Rights, Ms. Catherine Colonna, as well as heads of diplomatic missions from France and Germany in São Paulo.
The Space also consolidated as a hub for literary launches and author talks. In addition to hosting authors from the Feminismos Plurais Book Series, it welcomed independent writers published by different publishers, such as Esmeralda Ribeiro, Lenny Blue de Oliveira, and Carmen Faustino, among others, within the Movimento Autoral project. The project organizes debate nights and book signings with full cultural production, including reception, photographer, graphic materials, and book sales.
In 2025, Movimento Autoral received support from the Consulate General of France in São Paulo to create a book club and debates on works by French women authors. In November, the Space welcomed Nadia Yala Kisukidi for the launch of the book A Dissociação.
In 2023, the Johnnie Walker Fund call was published, aimed at supporting and professionalizing women-led Black entrepreneurial initiatives. Between 2024 and 2025, the Space partnered with the Formula 1 Grand Prix and Escola do Mecânico to train women in courses in mechanics, bodywork, and forklift operation. Both cohorts brought together dozens of participants, who celebrated completing the program during the Interlagos Grand Prix.
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL: 4 FEBRUARY 2022: Philosopher and writer Djamila Ribeiro reading and writing at her home in São Paulo. CREDIT: Victor Moriyama for The New York Times
FEMINISMOS PLURAIS PLATFORM
In 2020, Djamila Ribeiro launched the Feminismos Plurais Online Course Platform, focused on audiovisual communication and the study of Black feminism, among other approaches to racial and feminist studies. The day after its launch, she received an invitation from actor Paulo Gustavo to take over his Instagram page for one month—an unprecedented action in Brazil and, in terms of scale and duration, also in the international arena. The takeover inspired countless similar initiatives and gave rise to a movement fostering popular projects known by the hashtag #JuntospelaTransformação.
In total, more than 80 projects were supported through training and by distributing subscriptions aimed at strengthening community engagement. With support from TV host Fernanda Gentil, five thousand subscriptions were distributed to non-governmental organizations. The Platform launched with instructors from universities across different regions of the country and, due to its extensive production of articles, study groups, and live classes, came to be recognized as the largest streaming service for racial and feminist studies in Brazil.
With a monthly fee of R$ 19.90, the Platform was discontinued in 2022 due to insufficient resources to sustain its structure and operating costs. Its impacts, however, endured over time. Between 2021 and 2022, it provided guidance to master’s and doctoral projects aimed at gaining admission to Brazilian universities. Another notable initiative was the Festival Lugar de Fala, held during the pandemic, bringing together musicians, artists, and intellectuals in a program dedicated to culture and debate on racial and gender emancipation in Brazil.
In 2026, Djamila Ribeiro resumes offering online courses with the first edition of the Online Course on Lugar de Fala, delivered remotely with registration, marking a new stage in digital education linked to the Feminismos Plurais project.
PRESS AND AWARDS IN BRAZIL
In national media, Djamila maintains a continuous presence in Brazil’s leading print and audiovisual outlets, with particular emphasis on her work as a weekly columnist for Ilustrada, Folha de S.Paulo’s culture section, where she has written every Friday since June 2019, with illustrations by Aline Bispo.
She has collaborated with and appeared in outlets such as O Globo, O Estado de S.Paulo, and Valor Econômico. For one year, she was part of the panel of consultants on the TV show Amor & Sexo (Rede Globo) and was interviewed as the featured guest on Roda Viva (TV Cultura), in addition to serving twice as an interviewer. In 2021, she joined the program Saia Justa (GNT) as a guest for one month.
She has appeared on the covers of magazines such as Forbes Brasil, Marie Claire Brasil, ELLE Brasil, Cláudia, GQ Brasil, and Donna, as well as in fashion editorials in Harper’s Bazaar Brasil, Glamour Brasil, and Vogue Brasil, including participation in Milan Fashion Week at Prada’s invitation. She has appeared in political sections of magazines such as Época, IstoÉ, and Exame. She was a columnist for CartaCapital and a commentator on TV Cultura’s news program. She hosted a season of the show Entrevista (Canal Futura), during which she interviewed then city councilwoman Marielle Franco.
Among other distinctions, she has received the Cidadã SP Prize (Human Rights), the Dandara dos Palmares Prize, Trip Transformadores, the Brás Cubas Medal (Santos), the Mulher Imprensa Trophy, the Raça Negra Trophy from Faculdade Zumbi dos Palmares, and honors from the Legislative Assemblies of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In 2020, she received the Jabuti Prize for Pequeno Manual Antirracista in the Humanities category.
CORPORATE WORK
Since 2017, Djamila has been a prominent presence at business congresses and professional associations. Public recognition of her work, credibility, and pedagogy was quickly noted by brands interested in improving their diversity policies and teams.
In 2020, at the request of the Brazilian Olympic Committee, she conceived the course “Antiracist Sport: Everybody Wins,” directed at the Brazilian Olympic delegation for the Tokyo Games. The course was mandatory for athletes, technical staff, and federation leaders. The initiative received support from UNESCO and was exported to Olympic delegations from other countries.
Djamila coordinates consulting projects for large companies, involving products and institutional strategies, and, in partnership with law firms, she joins ESG teams to assess diversity in organizations. In 2021, she joined L’Oréal’s international diversity board in Paris, a position she held until 2023.
In 2022, at YouTube’s invitation, she produced—supported by the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji)—the course “Counter-Hegemonic Journalism: Reflections for a New Present,” based on a class she taught at PUC-SP and PUC-RS. In just one month, the course accumulated more than 3,000 hours of viewing and was adopted in Communication undergraduate programs.
Throughout her trajectory, she has carried out occasional campaigns and advertising actions for brands. In late 2018, she provided consulting and joined a campaign for Avon. In 2019, at The Body Shop’s invitation, she traveled to Tamale (Ghana) to visit shea-butter-producing communities. In 2021, she launched an exclusive lipstick line with the brand Quem disse Berenice?. Part of the fee was donated to the organizations Mulheres da Luz and Coletivo Neusa Santos.
Between 2020 and 2025, she served as a Johnnie Walker ambassador in Brazil, participating in the conception, formulation, and leadership of institutional and advertising campaigns. As part of that partnership, in 2025 the company supported the Pina Ball, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo’s gala ball chaired by Djamila, during which a high-profile institutional campaign was carried out. In the same period, Djamila starred in and developed scripts for campaigns, including “Black women keep marching,” featuring writers Carla Akotirene and Kiusam de Oliveira, produced with the approval of Lélia González’s family.
In 2023, she co-created and starred in the national campaign for the new Chevrolet Tracker, aimed at encouraging women to obtain driver’s licenses, with more than 300,000 women registered in the initiative.
Between 2023 and 2025, she developed actions for the Rio Open, including creation, recording, and narration of institutional videos, as well as lectures for the event organization. Between 2020 and 2025, most of Djamila’s corporate activities were brokered by Casé Fala, run by Patrícia Casé and Fabiana Oliva, while accounting services were provided by Pappo Consult.
VOLUNTARY BOARD ROLES AND SOCIAL ACTIONS
In 2024, Djamila Ribeiro began serving, on a voluntary basis, on a number of boards. In June, she was elected to a seat on the Governing Council of Fundação Padre Anchieta, the institution that maintains TV Cultura. In July, she joined the Board of Directors of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and, in August, she was announced as a member of the USP Endowment Fund Council.
In 2025, she assumed the presidency of the committee for the Pinacoteca de São Paulo’s 120th Anniversary Ball, an event dedicated to institutional celebration and cultural mobilization for the museum. That same year, she wrote the afterword for the Pinacoteca’s 120th anniversary commemorative book, reflecting on memory, heritage, cultural democracy, and the challenge of expanding access to the arts in Brazil. Since 2025, she has also served as a patron-supporter of the Pinacoteca. She was invited to chair the committee by Jochen Volz, Marília Gessa (fundraising director), and Cláudio Sonder (board chair).
In the social sphere, her book donations have surpassed tens of thousands of copies, distributed to libraries, public schools, reading clubs, community preparatory courses, and prison units, as well as in large-scale shipments. With each book release, Djamila typically distributes at least 100 copies and carries out other solidarity actions. In 2019, she donated 500 books to communities and libraries in the nine states of Brazil’s Legal Amazon, in partnership with Fundação Tide Setúbal. That same year, 1,000 books were donated to MST settlements. Also in 2019, 10,000 copies of Apropriação Cultural (Rodney William) were prepared for donation to public high school students.
In 2021, during an appearance on the TV program Hora do Faro, she announced the donation of 1,000 books to Majori Silva, a young woman who built with her own hands the Biblioteca Lugar de Fala, in tribute to the author, in a peripheral community in Campinas (São Paulo). During the coronavirus crisis, in partnership with Lola Cosmetics, she coordinated efforts that resulted in the donation of 10,000 bottles of hand sanitizer to quilombola communities in the Região dos Lagos (Rio de Janeiro).
As an activist, for many years she has served as an educator in preparatory courses aimed at Black youth. In 2016, she was Deputy Secretary of Human Rights in São Paulo’s city government under Mayor Fernando Haddad, contributing to policies such as Transcidadania, focused on supporting and training transgender people in situations of vulnerability. Later, she delivered trainings for the Escola Feminista de Heliópolis and participated in capacity-building courses for prosecutors, judges, and other agents of Brazil’s justice system. In 2025, she visited a juvenile detention unit in Vitória (Espírito Santo), where adolescents deprived of liberty were reading her work in a reading group.
She currently serves as an educator for Promotoras Legais Populares (PLPs), an initiative that trains women leaders in the peripheries of the state of São Paulo, and she gives talks and holds events in peripheral communities across different regions of the country.
In 2021, she spearheaded a lawsuit against Twitter, grounded in research indicating that Black women are the main targets of hate speech, denouncing the platform’s economic exploitation of racism and misogyny. That same year, at the invitation of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE), she led a national campaign to combat misinformation about the electoral process and the functioning of Brazil’s electronic voting machines, without receiving compensation.
CULTURE, MUSIC, AND CARNIVAL
Djamila Ribeiro’s public presence is also consolidated in the cultural sphere, in dialogue with Brazilian popular music and with Carnival—central arenas of symbolic elaboration, memory, and political imagination in Brazil. In 2023, Djamila was a featured figure of Estação Primeira de Mangueira during Carnival. In 2024, she was honored by the samba school União Imperial, reinforcing the popular and cultural dimension of her trajectory. Over the years, she has also been invited to participate in parades with Vai-Vai, Beija-Flor de Nilópolis, and Portela.
In the musical field, Djamila maintains an ongoing dialogue with key artists in Brazilian culture. She has met with Milton Nascimento on multiple occasions and wrote the presentation text for his latest concert tour. She also met with Djavan and wrote the presentation for the album Dja. Djamila also wrote a text for an Elza Soares album, and she contributed to the documentary on the life and work of Alaíde Costa.
Her cultural influence is also expressed in how her thought resonates in musical creation: her work has inspired compositions by artists such as Margareth Menezes (at the time, still “only” a singer) and Chico César, among others, demonstrating the cross-cutting reach of her work beyond the editorial and academic field.
DJAMILA RIBEIRO IN NEW YORK (2024) — NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
In August 2024, Djamila Ribeiro lived in New York, where she taught for one semester at New York University as a visiting professor in the Andrés Bello Chair, a chair devoted to critical reflection on democracy, knowledge production, and Global South thought. The course was offered to master’s and doctoral students and connected teaching, research, and public programming.
Throughout the semester, she organized four public events, bringing together five guests whose trajectories speak directly to her intellectual and political field: Ibram X. Kendi, Alessandra Devulsky, Selma Dealdina, Linda Alcoff, and Nadia Yala Kisukidi.
Alongside her teaching, she carried out a U.S. book tour. Accompanied by Nicole Gullane and Liz Dórea, director and photographer of the documentary that records this moment, she began the tour at Yale University and continued to Rutgers University, the University of Georgia, Spelman College, UCLA, San Diego State University, and Harvard University. During this period, she appeared at the Brooklyn Book Festival on a panel alongside Saidiya Hartman, Edwidge Danticat, and Dionne Brand, and also participated as a guest at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico.
In Washington, she launched her books at the bookstore Politics and Prose, with opening remarks by Brazil’s ambassador to the United States, Maria Viotti. In New York, she participated in a book launch night at the Consulate General of Brazil in New York, gathering the Brazilian community living in the city.
During this period, she published a series on orixás in Folha de S.Paulo, with twenty columns on orixás and the cosmology of Ketu Candomblé, and she published an academic article in Women’s Studies Quarterly on motherhood through the lens of the Yabás, the female orixás. Her book received coverage in outlets such as the U.S. Los Angeles Times and Portugal’s Expresso.
DJAMILA RIBEIRO AT MIT (2025)
As the end of her teaching term at New York University approached, Djamila Ribeiro received an invitation from Professor Joaquin Terrones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to apply to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholars program. Her candidacy was endorsed by three different departments at the university—an uncommon achievement in this type of process. Djamila was approved unanimously and returned to Brazil at the beginning of 2025, with the commitment to return later that year to begin her academic journey in Cambridge.
In the first half of 2025, she maintained an intense schedule of literary, corporate, and social events. In April, her financial activities began to be managed by Galáticos Capital, a family fund company linked to Ronaldo Fenômeno, under the management of Viviane Leal Freitas and Amílcar Lopes.
In June, she traveled to Europe, beginning a tour in Wales at the Hay Festival (Hay-on-Wye). She then went to Oxford, becoming the first Brazilian person in history to deliver the Taylor Lecture at the University of Oxford. From England, she traveled to France, where she gave the opening lecture of the Saint-Malo Festival, in an edition dedicated to the memory of Marielle Franco. She then went to Paris for a sold-out launch event before continuing on to Johannesburg.
In South Africa, she joined a delegation of Pinacoteca de São Paulo patrons on institutional visits to museums and cultural centers in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In that context, she delivered a public lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University).
At the end of August, on the eve of her departure for MIT, she officially presented the relaunch of her personal brand, developed by FutureBrand São Paulo, marking a new stage of her public and institutional work.
In September 2025, Djamila arrived at MIT and, in the first weeks, received the news that Service95 Book Club, an initiative by Dua Lipa, had recommended Where We Stand. The fact gained even more attention with the artist’s shows in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, amplifying the recommendation widely in the Brazilian press.
At MIT, her first semester was a sabbatical term. During that period, she dedicated herself to writing the expanded edition of Lugar de Fala, joined the university’s sailing team and learned to sail on the Charles River, and attended classes by MIT professors. At the same time, she prepared materials for the course Global South Feminisms, which she will teach in the first semester of 2026.
São Paulo, February 28, 2023 – Date the website was published with biographical information, links to purchase books, recent articles, professional schedule, and contacts.
Last update: December 24, 2025.
