Following a competitive national search, Chanel Craft Tanner has been selected to serve as the next Director for the Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center as of June 2024.
Tanner has spent much of her career in leadership roles at Emory University where she earned her PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Since 2017, she served as the Director of the Center for Women at Emory, focusing on creating programs, events, and learning opportunities that recognize and redress historic and persistent gender inequity at Emory and beyond.
Tanner, who also holds an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University and a BA in Political Science from the University of Maryland, is a member of the internationally recognized Crunk Feminist Collective, where she writes and speaks about popular culture informed by expertise in Black feminism and hip-hop studies. She is the co-author (along with Brittney Cooper and Susana Morris), of Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood published by Norton Young Readers and selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Book of 2021.
Tanner has long admired UVA’s Women’s Center as one of higher education’s premier women’s centers. “The opportunity to lead such a historic center excites me. I'm looking forward to seeing what I can offer to the Women’s Center, especially as the first woman of color to lead the space, to make sure that we're serving all the students that need us or want to be involved as allies.” Tanner’s intersectional lens will be a valuable asset “to how we do this work, ensuring that more women of color and more first-generation students are seeing women’s centers as places that are for them.”
A full announcement from the Women’s Center can be read here.