Dr. Django Paris is the inaugural holder of the James A. and Cherry A. Banks Professorship in Multicultural Education and Director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice at the University of Washington. He was previously on the faculties of Michigan State University and Arizona State University.  Dr. Paris is a Black educator, born in California to a White American mother and Black Jamaican father. He received a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University. He spent six years as an English Language Arts teacher in California, Arizona, and the Dominican Republic before entering graduate school.

Dr. Paris's teaching and research focus on understanding and sustaining languages, literacies, and lifeways among Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander youth and communities in the context of demographic and social change. He has published three books on teaching and researching for educational justice:  Language Across Difference:  Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identifies in Changing Urban Schools (2011), Humanizing Research:  Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (2014), and most recently, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies:  Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (2017).  He has also published in many academic journals, including the Harvard Educational Review, and Educational Researcher.