Mariama (Mari) Smith Gray, Ph.D. is an educational leader, teacher, researcher, and Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University East Bay. The 2024 recipient of the Ollie V. Greene Humanitarian Award and 2021 CSU East Bay Outstanding Scholar on Issues of Diversity, Social Justice & Multiculturalism, Mari has developed award-winning, high-performing schools, departments and programs at the PK-university level.

 

Mari has dedicated her career to studying, teaching and researching educational inequity. Her research  in critical geography has focused the world's attention to the historical discourses, beliefs, systems, policies and practices that educators have taken up to create and maintain racialized, classed and gendered social-spatial inequities; how educators' beliefs moderate student access to educational opportunity; and evidence-based pedagogies for preparing abolitionist educational leaders. 

 

Mari is co-founder of the Abolitionist Leadership Collective at CSU East Bay--a collaborative of students, faculty and university alumni dedicated to teaching and learning about abolitionist leadership and carceral education--and Black Women Leaders at CSU East Bay--a mentoring and support group for African American women who lead educational institutions in Northern California. 

 

Trained as an anthropologist of education to observe and identify cultural practices in organizations and communities, Mari brings 30 years of teaching and leadership experience to her work helping educators recognize the unjust, dehumanizing and carceral beliefs, discourses and practices that contribute to inequities for historically marginalized communities, and to creating and sustaining just, humanizing and liberatory educational communities. 

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Mari is the PI of Principal Decision-making in Student Discipline, a study of the disproportionate discipline of Latinx and African American students, and the Great Migration Study, a digital storytelling project that examines the experiences of African Americans during the Great Migration in Northern California. Click here​ to listen to Mari's interview about the Great Migration Study on Insight. Click here to download information about the Great Migration Study.