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Paramount Members+- Wednesday, January 22 at 1:00PM
General Public- Friday, January 24 at 10:00AM

Join The Legal Aid Justice Center for an evening featuring legendary civil rights icon Angela Davis in conversation with the Legal Aid Justice Center’s Executive Director Angela Ciolfi and moderated by Ted Howard, Pro Bono Partner at Wiley Rein.

About the Event
The Legal Aid Justice Center is proud to present a rare opportunity to hear from one of the most influential activists and scholars of our time. This free public event offers a unique chance to engage with Angela Davis’s profound insights into critical issues of social justice, racial and economic discrimination, and systemic change.

The Speaker
Angela Davis is internationally known for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Her work as an educator—both at the university level and in the larger public sphere—has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender equality.

Professor Angela Davis is the author of nine books and has lectured worldwide. Recently, a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List” for a crime she did not commit. She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment.

Davis’ most recent books are Abolition Democracy, Are Prisons Obsolete, and The Meaning of Freedom. She is a member of the executive board of the Women of Color Resource Center, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that emphasizes popular education—of and about women who live in conditions of poverty. She also works with Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. She spent the last fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D program, and of Feminist Studies.

Like many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

The Participants
Ted Howard is the full-time Pro Bono Partner at Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, D.C., where he oversees administration of the 250-lawyer firm’s Pro Bono Program, while also maintaining an active caseload representing individuals and groups of clients in civil rights, family law, housing, immigration, and public benefits matters. Ted is currently the Chair of the D.C. Circuit Judicial Conference Standing Committee on Pro Bono Legal Services, and Co-Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance. He serves as the Chair of the Legal Aid Justice Center, and he has served on the ABA Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defense from 2015 to 2021, including three years as Chair, and the Board of Governors of the District of Columbia Bar from 2016 to 2022. He has been honored for his pro bono contributions by the Legal Aid Society of D.C., with its Servant of Justice Award in 2006, by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, with its Wiley A. Branton Award in 2015, and by the Washington Council of Lawyers, with its first ever Justice Impact Award to an individual law firm attorney in 2023. Ted is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Harvard Law School.

Angela Ciolfi has been the Executive Director of the Legal Aid Justice Center since 2018. Since she began working at LAJC in 2004, she has served as an attorney, Legal Director of the Youth Justice Program, and the organization’s Director of Litigation and Advocacy. Angela has worked on many of LAJC’s biggest campaigns, including the Drive Down the Debt Campaign targeting Virginia’s punitive license suspension statute. She has also litigated significant cases in the Virginia Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. While leading the Youth Justice Program, Angela helped to secure and protect state funding for PreK-12 public schools and won successful reforms related to exclusionary school discipline, school policing, and special education. As Director of Litigation and Advocacy, Angela worked to empower LAJC’s staff to take on high impact campaigns in partnership with community leaders. She is a graduate of The College of William and Mary and The University of Virginia School of Law. After law school, Angela clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Reginald C. Lindsay in Massachusetts. Angela received the Oliver White Hill Award from the Virginia State Bar in 2003, the Child Advocacy Award from the American Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division in 2010, the 2017 Virginia Legal Aid Award by the Virginia State Bar Access to Legal Services Committee, and was in the inaugural 2019 class of Virginia Influential Women of Law.

This is a FREE event, but registration is required.

About the Legal Aid Justice Center
The Legal Aid Justice Center partners with communities and clients to fight for racial, social, and economic justice by dismantling systems that create and perpetuate poverty. Learn more at https://www.justice4all.org/.

Have a question for Angela Davis? Click here.

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO! The Paramount Theater is pleased to bring diverse programming to the stage and screen. The Theater does not provide advisories about subject matter for events, as sensitivities vary. Not all events may appeal to, or be appropriate for, every person. Patrons are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the shows offered in order to make informed decisions prior to purchasing tickets.

In addition to show synopses, trailers, and reviews on our web events, other resources about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on Common Sense Media, IMDb, and DoesTheDogDie.com as well as through general internet searches. For further questions, please contact the Box Office at 434.979.1333 or at boxoffice@theparamount.net, 10AM-2PM Monday-Friday + 1 hour before events.