Gloria Ladson Billings is an advocate and scholar whose work has focused on culturally relevant pedagogy, a means of enfranchising diverse students in schools. Her academic areas of interest include educational anthropology, cultural studies, and critical race theory applications to education. She currently teaches Multicultural Perspectives in Education and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. She holds her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Teacher Education from Stanford University.

She has authored critically acclaimed books such as The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children (Jossey-Bass 1994), Beyond the Big House: African-American Educators on Teacher Education (Teachers College Press 2005), and Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms (Jossey-Bass 2001).

Her work has won numerous scholarly awards including the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Palmer O. Johnson outstanding research award. During the 2003–2004 academic year, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.