Program Director

N. Ordover joined Funders for LGBTQ Issues as the Program Director in February 2010. Over the years she has worked in a variety of settings on HIV/AIDS, immigration, detention, and criminal justice policy and on racial and economic justice, gender equity, legal, welfare, housing, labor, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ issues.

Ordover's book, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism, focuses on the convergence of medical, judicial, and public policy discourses that left marginalized communities and populations (immigrants, people of color, poor women, LGBTQ people, people living with HIV/AIDS and people receiving state assistance) vulnerable to eugenics for the better part of the twentieth century and explores the ways in which this legacy continues to inform economic and health care policies. It was published in 2003 by the University of Minnesota to favorable reviews in a number of publications here and abroad, including The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The San Francisco Guardian, Ha'aretz, The American Historical Review, and Gender Forum. It is currently on university syllabi across the country.

In 2006, Ordover founded the Coalition to Lift the Bar, an alliance of LGBT, human rights, immigrant justice and HIV/AIDS organizations dedicated to overturning the policy that barred HIV-positive people from entering the U.S. as travelers or immigrants, and which denied immigrants already in the U.S. any type of legal status. In the course of its successful campaign to eliminate the ban, the coalition was able to increase the visibility of immigrant justice and human rights concerns in HIV/AIDS organizations and national coalitions. Ordover has also served on the International Task Team on HIV-Related Travel Restrictions, convened by UNAIDS and concerned with issues relating to the human rights, public health, and economic impacts of HIV-entry bars on immigrants, migrants, refugees, asylees, detainees and other mobile populations.

Ordover earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied with some of the country's foremost scholars of race and politics. In early 2004, she concluded a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship (post-doc) at Columbia University's Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights.

While in San Francisco, Ordover served on the collective of the Center for Social Research and Education (CSRE), the publisher of Socialist Review, a highly regarded, nonsectarian journal concerned with issues of public policy, cultural dissent and political economy.

For several years, Ordover taught Urban Studies at the Queens College Worker Education Extension Center in Manhattan, a program borne of collaboration between the City University of New York and local labor unions, designed for rank and file union members working toward their BAs and MAs.