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Your Imagination

 

Born to a Kenyan mother and a European-American father, Joy Zarembka grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in a racially-mixed neighborhood. She graduated from Haverford College with a degree from Bryn Mawr College in Sociology and Africana Studies. Upon graduation, she was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, where she began her research for The Pigment of Your Imagination. Her Watson proposal, entitled, “The Family Socialization of Biracial Offspring in Britain and Former British Colonies: A Comparative Study of Great Britain, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Jamaica” was selected and financially supported for a year of independent study abroad. After traveling to the four countries, she returned to the United States and began writing up her discoveries. In 1997, while pursing a Master’s degree from Yale University in International Relations, she was awarded the Fox International Fellowship to study at Cambridge University in England. Over the years, she traveled back to the various countries to collect further data and published her findings in 2007.

Joy currently works in Washington, DC as the Executive Director of Break the Chain Campaign, an organization working to end modern-day slavery and human trafficking in the United States, through her project at the Institute for Policy Studies. In February 2002, Joy received the Young Women of Achievement Award. She has also written a critically-acclaimed chapter in Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. Joy presently testifies as an expert witness at trials for human trafficking and worker exploitation and she has been quoted in The Washington Post, The Nation, and US News and World Report and The New York Times for her trafficking expertise.