Dr. Krishauna Hines-Gaither is the Vice President for Equity, Diversity and Justice at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. Now residing in LA, she is a North Carolina native. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she focused her scholarship on Afro-Latinx cultural heritage. At university, she studied Spanish and French. Her first language was African American Vernacular English. Before entering administration, Dr. Hines-Gaither was a college professor of Spanish and Cultural Studies for over two decades. She is a past president of the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina, and she is the 2025 President-Elect of ACTFL, the first African American woman to hold this position. She was the inaugural co-chair of ACTFL’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee. In service to the community, Dr. Hines-Gaither is a DEI advisor to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). For excellence in DEI, she was named a “Voice for Change” by Spectrum News, voted the 2024 Woman of the Year for DEI by the LA County Board of Supervisors, and received the 2024 Legacy Award from the California Black Women’s Collective Empowerment Institute. Her work has been featured in major publications and on national television networks. She is the co-author of The Antiracist World Language Classroom (Routledge Press, 2023) and also co-author of Mastering Spanish through Global Debate by Georgetown University Press (2023). Dr. Hines-Gaither is a frequent speaker, trainer and facilitator.