Sheerine Alemzadeh

Sheerine is the co-founder and co-director of Healing to Action, a non-profit organization whose mission is to end gender-based violence through building the leadership and collective power of the communities most impacted -- low-income, disability, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and immigrant communities. Sheerine has forged strategic partnerships across the nation to develop community-based, survivor-led responses to gender-based violence, including launching the Survivor Power Institute, a national training and movement-building program for practitioners to develop expertise in applying survivor leadership as a critical intervention strategy to gender-based violence. She is the author of the book, Survivor Genius: A New Vision for Ending Gender-Based Violence (The New Press, 2026).

Prior to co-founding Healing to Action, Sheerine was an attorney specializing in litigation on behalf of survivors, and received the prestigious Skadden Fellowship in 2011 to launch a project at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation that advanced workplace justice for survivors of sexual violence. In addition to litigating sexual harassment, sexual assault, and civil rights cases, Sheerine co-founded the Coalition Against Workplace Sexual Violence, a collaboration between rape crisis agencies, civil rights organizations, workers centers, and government agencies. She also served as a judicial law clerk on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and co-taught a seminar on gender and international human rights at Northwestern University Law School.

Sheerine has been quoted in numerous news outlets including the Washington Post, Vox, The Guardian, the Chicago Sun-Times, Teen Vogue, Truthout and multiple public radio stations. She has published on the intersection of economic inequality and gender-based violence in numerous legal and media publications, including New York University Journal of Law & Social Change, Chicago Tribune, Michigan Journal of Gender & the Law, Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law & Society, Huffington Post, Role Reboot,, and Labor Notes. Her work has been cited in over a dozen law review articles as well as a Nevada Supreme Court decision.

Sheerine is an alumna of the Fund for New Leadership fellowship and the Windcall Residency, and a recipient of the Gender Equality Award from the Chicago chapter of the U.S. Committee for UN-Chicago Chapter,and the Cook County Peggy Montes Unsung Heroine Award. Sheerine is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

Sub-specialties: Community organizing, public policy, leadership development, community health, inequality, worker rights, labor justice, gender-based violence in low-income communities, violence against immigrant women and girls, transformative justice violence against women of color.

Sub-specialties: Workplace sexual violence, sexual harassment, low-wage workers, undocumented workers, LGBT workers, pregnant workers, employment discrimination, labor organizing, women-led community organizing, gender violence in low-income communities, violence against immigrant women and girls, violence against women of color.