Maya Dimant is a Lecturer and Clinical Law Fellow in the Program in Law & Public Policy at the Princeton School of Public & International Affairs. Her work focuses on racial justice and deconstructing the modern carceral state, sitting at the intersection of experiential pedagogy, law, alternative dispute resolution, and reenvisioning justice systems.

Maya is passionate about developing creative pedagogical models for students learning advocacy and extrajudicial tools to become bold decarceration visionaries. Among other courses, she teaches the experiential “Making an Exoneree” class, which works in partnership with Georgetown University to research and produce documentaries to free wrongfully convicted people from incarceration. She previously served as a Friedman Fellow/Co-director in the Prisoner and Reentry Clinic at George Washington University Law School, where she supervised students representing incarcerated people, and co-taught a seminar exploring how institutionalized white supremacy created the prison industrial complex.

Prior to that, Maya was an Assistant Public Defender in Maryland, where she completed Gideon's Promise training and represented over 1,000 clients in misdemeanor and felony proceedings. Maya was also an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the James B. Moran Center for Youth Advocacy in Evanston, IL. A trained mediator and restorative justice circle keeper, her project focused on breaking the school to prison pipeline for students in low-income families by leveraging community-based criminal defense representation, suspension alternative skills-building workshops in schools, and local resources for collaborative reentry support.