Ráday Salon

About Linda

Linda Carranza is a committed and creative activist of widely varied interests and passions. Her work falls under many different job titles, but first among these is human rights advocate and experienced human rights trainer.  She believes in grassroots activism, advocacy that is responsive to local communities, and non-violence as a key tactic in social change.

Linda first came to Budapest in 2003 as a summer legal fellow for the European Roma Rights Centre, and remains committed to supporting Romani activists working to protect the rights of Roma across Europe. Later, Linda worked as a Legal Officer for the Public Interest Law Institute (PILI), an international legal reform NGO, after being promoted from the position of Research Associate. Her work involved project development and management and developed particular expertise in European human rights and anti-discrimination standards and enforcement mechanisms.

Subjects she has worked on over her career include minority rights, refugee/immigration issues, women’s rights, sexual assault and domestic violence awareness, LGBT rights, environmental justice, freedom of association, and freedom of expression. She has given presentations on international anti-discrimination law to European lawyers and NGO professionals, coached students at the Central European University Legal Studies Program in an annual moot court, conducted trainings on creative advocacy in human rights for groups of youth activists in Central and Eastern Europe, and acted as a mentor and informal advisor to numerous young people on pursuing a human rights career.

In the US, Linda’s work focused on minority issues, anti- discrimination, and immigrant rights support. While a student at New York University School of Law, Linda was a member of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, which provided legal services and advice to immigrant communities and individuals in the New York area. Her primary case involved a long-time immigrant resident of the United States who was illegally deported to Colombia based on a faulty interpretation of law. Linda worked on the researching and drafting of the legal petitions in the highest stage of the case, in the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The court decided in the client’s favor, ultimately resulting in his being returned to the US and reunited with his family nearly 8 years after his deportation.

Other work Linda has done includes providing legal assistance to the grassroots organization Domestic Workers United, which is made up of housecleaners, babysitters, and other domestic employees. Linda helped research and draft a bill that the women of DWU sought to pass in New York state, and accompanied representatives of DWU to the state capital to advocate for the law with legislators. She also served as a trainer with the New York Civil Rights Coalition, leading workshops on combating stereotypes and discrimination for high school students in New York City. More recently, she was a member of the Advisory Panel for an international documentary film under development entitled Painting Our Courage: A Revolution To End Gender Based Violence and HIV & AIDS, and is one of the founding members of the Global Network for Non-violence, a group of international activists focused on international peace actions.

Over the years, Linda has developed her writing skills in various directions. AT NYU, she was on the staff of the Journal of International Law and Politics, first as a staff editor and then as a member of the editorial board. In her professional positions, she has contributed to grant proposals, written news and profile pieces for online publication, and designed and authored conference reports. She also developed content for PILI’s website, and copyedited and proofread numerous hard-copy publications.

Currently, Linda writes for the Ráday Salon blog, which she designed and maintains. She has also designed a number of other small-scale, blog-based websites, including personal web sites and websites for small non-profit organizations. While at PILI, Linda was responsible for managing the organization’s web team, participating in the redesign of PILI’s two main websites and the creation and maintenance of two additional sites.

Linda has extensive language skills. As the child of a Costa Rican family that immigrated to the United States, she is a native/bilingual speaker of English and Spanish. She is an advanced speaker of Russian and has intermediate skills in Hungarian and conversational-level Italian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. In addition, she has also formally studied Polish, Japanese, German, and French. She is an experienced language teacher, having taught Russian at the university level in the United States, as well as English and Spanish as an independent teacher in both the US and Hungary. She has also done translations of short articles into English from both Russian and Hungarian.

Linda’s main creative outlet is writing, but she is also an experienced stage actor.  Her first introduction to the Central and Eastern European region was on a theatre exchange she participated in 1990, between an American youth theatre group and a Moscow children’s theatre, which included performances of Man of La Mancha in Moscow and (then) Leningrad. Later acting highlights include performing the lead role of Katherina in an alternative staging of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and playing for several years in an ensemble improvisational comedy troupe.

A native of southwestern Connecticut, or what she would rather call the New York City suburbs, Linda considers herself a New Yorker at heart.  She attended university at the University of Massachusetts, where she had a major specialization in Russian, and minor specializations in Spanish and international relations. She received a graduate degree from Indiana University, where she studied Russian and East European area studies and Russian literature. Subsequently she attended law school at New York University School of Law, where she focused on human rights, anti-discrimination, and immigration law..