Jody Lewen

President, Mount Tamalpais College

Jody Lewen is president of Mount Tamalpais College, at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California. MTC provides a liberal arts Associate of Arts degree, as well as an intensive college preparatory program, to approximately 300 people incarcerated at San Quentin. MTC also provides support to higher education in prison practitioners and other stakeholders, including correctional administrators, funders, policymakers, and media, on creating academically excellent, inclusive in-prison higher education programs.

Dr. Lewen holds a Bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University (modern European history); a Master’s degree from the Freie Universität, Berlin (comparative literature and philosophy); and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

She was the recipient of the Peter E. Haas Public Service Award from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. In 2016, MTC (then the Prison University Project) received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. In 2018, Dr. Lewen was named a Frederick Douglass 200 awardee.