Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Roy holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. Her book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (Routledge, 2010) is the recipient of the 2011 Paul Davidoff Book Award of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, an award for research that advances social justice. In 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty. She was the 2009 California Professor of the Year by CASE/Carnegie Foundation. Most recently, Roy received the 2011 Excellence in Achievement Award of the California Alumni Association, a lifetime achievement recognition. Roy teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses and supervises doctoral students in departments ranging from City and Regional Planning to Geography to Education. In keeping with these teaching interests, Roy has been leading experiments with new formats of pedagogy and public scholarship, such as the #GlobalPOV Project, which includes a series of eight Youtube videos combining critical social theory with improvised art to provoke discussion about poverty and inequality.