GABRIELLE PRISCO
Co-Executive Director
Gabrielle’s leadership + work integrates holistic, collective, legal, policy, interpersonal and structural approaches to social change. Since 2005, Gabrielle has worked with and for young people inside/impacted by systems. Her work is rooted and focused in NYC—where she was born and raised.
Gabrielle joined Lineage in 2015 as its sole full-time staff member—shepherding the organization through a period of rapid expansion and evolution. Since 2021, Gabrielle and Jessica Mingus have worked hand-in-hand as Lineage’s Co-EDs.
Guided by the belief that stories are a critical strategy for justice + social change, Gabrielle blends storytelling and advocacy on stages and pages, including in a TEDx talk (On Canaries, Love and Justice); as a regular panelist in the annual Wisdom 2.0/Mindfulness in America convening; and as the author of “When the Cure Makes You Ill: Seven Core Principles to Change the Course of Youth Justice” in the New York Law School Law Review. She was a Finalist for The David Prize, which recognizes New Yorkers with visionary ideas for the city.
Known to say that “when a problem is a web, it can’t be solved by a lone wolf,” Gabrielle also serves on the Advisory Team of the Women’s Leadership Circle (WLC)—a mutual aid-type network of female-identified leaders of social impact organizations.
Gabrielle was Director of the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of NY from 2010 - 2015—where her work was instrumental to groundbreaking protections for LGBTQ young people in systems as well as increased oversight over the use of force/restraints on young people in “detention.” From 2005 - 2010, she was a Legal Aid attorney for children in “child protection” and “juvenile delinquency” cases who simultaneously fought for system-wide change—including co-designing trainings for staff working with LGBTQ young people. Gabrielle also worked as the founding Project Manager of the Data Collection and Policy Project, housed within Legal Aid’s Juvenile Rights Practice—where she designed and built a system to collect/analyze case-level data in order to identify + illuminate racial and ethnic disparities in the city’s “juvenile delinquency” system.
Gabrielle was the William J. Brennan Fellow at the ACLU, focusing on First Amendment litigation and threats to civil rights and liberties in the name of “national security.” Gabrielle also was the Derrick Bell Fellow at NYU Law, where she co-taught constitutional law with Professor Derrick Bell and assisted with research/writing for his seminal text “Race, Racism, and American Law, 5th ed.”
She holds a J.D. cum laude from NYU School of Law (Arthur Garfield Hays Fellow; John F. Kennedy Jr. Fellow); an M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Alabama; and a B.S. magna cum laude in Human and Organizational Development from Vanderbilt University—where she was in one of the first cohorts of Posse Scholars. Gabrielle served on the Posse Foundation’s national Board of Directors and received a Posse Star for her social change work.
By night, Gabrielle is writing a kaleidoscopic novel spanning two continents, three wars, four generations of women navigating political + spiritual crises, and multiple dimensions of reality. She sources inspiration and strength from her ancestors; stories + metaphors; and, most of all, from being and working in relationship.