Danielle Citron is the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law at UVA, where she writes and teaches about privacy, free expression, and civil rights. Her scholarship and advocacy have been recognized nationally and internationally. In 2019, Citron was named a MacArthur Fellow based on her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy. In 2018, she received the UMD Champion of Excellence award and in 2015, the United Kingdom’s Prospect Magazine named her one of the Top 50 World Thinkers and The Daily Record named her one of the Top 50 Most Influential Marylanders.

Her book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Harvard University Press, 2014) was widely praised in published reviews, discussed in blog posts and named one of the 20 Best Moments for Women in 2014 by the editors of Cosmopolitan magazine. She has published more than 40 law review articles, including in the Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review (three times), California Law Review (twice), Southern California Law Review, Texas Law Review and many more, which have won professional awards from the International Association of Privacy Professionals, as well as from the privacy think tank Future of Privacy. She has written more than 40 opinion pieces for major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Time, and Slate.

For the past decade, Citron has worked with lawmakers, law enforcement, and tech companies to combat invasions of intimate privacy. In June 2019, she testified before Congress about the national security and privacy risks of deepfakes and have been working with Hill staff on a bill to criminalize digital forgeries. She has been deeply involved in reform efforts around the regulation of online platforms. In October 2019, she testified before Congress about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. She is currently working with Senate and House staff (both for individual members as well as committees) on proposed Section 230 amendments and has been working with major tech companies on privacy matters. Since 2011, she has been a member of Facebook’s Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery Task Force and an adviser and a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Task Force and as an adviser to the company since 2009.

From 2014 to 2016, Citron served as an advisor to then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris and as a member of Harris’ Task Force to Combat Cyber Exploitation and Violence Against Women. In October 2015, Citron, with Harris, spoke at a press conference to discuss her office’s new online resource for law enforcement and individuals whose nude images were disclosed without consent. In 2011, Citron testified about misogynistic cyber hate speech before the Inter-Parliamentary Committee on Anti-Semitism at the House of Commons in the United Kingdom.

Citron is the vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for civil rights and liberties in the digital age that was founded in 2013 and named after her article “Cyber Civil Rights.” She serves on the boards of directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Future of Privacy, as well as on the Advisory Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Technology and Society and the Center on Investigative Journalism. In 2020, she received a $75,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to study the salutary impact of intimate privacy laws on victims, a project that she is co-leading with Canadian academic Jonathon Penney.

Citron is an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Center on Internet and Society, Yale Information Society Project, and NYU’s Policing Project. She is a member of Axon’s advisory board on artificial intelligence ethics. As a member of the American Law Institute, she serves as an adviser to the Restatement Third, Information Privacy Principles Project and Restatement (Third) Torts: Defamation and Privacy.

Citron has appeared on film and television (HBO’s “Vice News,” HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” Hulu’s “The Weekly,” “Netizens,” and HBO’s “Swiped”); been quoted in hundreds of news articles, interviewed on National Public Radio more than 25 times; appeared on podcasts for Slate, Lawfare, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe; and given a TED talk, “How Deepfakes Undermine Truth and Democracy,” at the 2019 TED Global Summit. Her TED talk has been viewed more than 1.9 million times. She has given more than 400 talks at major universities, federal and state agencies, the National Holocaust Museum, the Wikimedia Foundation, the National Association of Attorneys General, and think tanks.

Before joining UVA Law, Citron taught at Boston University School of Law and the University of Maryland School of Law. She has been a visiting professor at Fordham Law School and George Washington Law School. In 2016, she was a Dean’s Distinguished Visitor at Washington University School of Law and an interdisciplinary studies fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.