Dr. Julissa Muñiz is an assistant professor of education in the School of Education and Information Studies and the Director of Inside Initiatives for the Institute of Arts and Science at UC Santa Cruz. Broadly, her scholarship examines how people and communities of color –specifically Latinx and Black communities– navigate, negotiate, and resist racialized organizations and systems of power, such as the education, criminal legal, and juvenile legal systems. More specifically, Dr. Muñiz examines the conditions that both enable and constrain generative teaching, learning, and identity development in carceral contexts, with an interest in better understanding how youth, women, and gender expansive individuals live and learn while confined. Her work uplifts how incarcerated community members co-create fugitive liberatory learning environments for themselves and others in spite of the carceral institutions they exist in. 

Dr. Muñiz holds an Ed.M. in Prevention Science and Practice from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a M.A. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University, and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has been generously supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, the Social Science Research Council, the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, and the Latina Futures, 2050 Lab. 

Dr. Muñiz is a faculty fellow with the Center for Justice where she supports the Prison Education Program and ongoing efforts to create a bachelor's degree program in Justice Studies for students who are incarcerated. She is a proud first-generation borderlands scholar from San Ysidro, California. Prior to graduate school, Julissa served as a middle school academic counselor for TRIO Talent Search in Oakland, California, and GED co-instructor for the Adult Peer Education Project at San Quentin State Prison.