Meet the Birth Wars Producer, Sharon Bissell

Sharon Bissell is a senior philanthropic expert with experience designing high impact giving strategies for large and small donor agencies in a range of issues from reproductive rights and health, migration, transparency and accountability, and human rights.

Building from twenty years of experience at MacArthur Foundation’s Mexico Office, including eleven years as its Director, she is currently the Senior Philanthropic Advisor for Ariadne Charitable Trust, where she is spearheading a new field of work in children’s sexual rights and health in the digital age.

In solidarity with families searching for their loved ones to the wave of violence in Mexico since 2006, she was invited to serve as a founding member of the Mecanismo Extraordinario de Identificación Forense in 2022, as Technical Expert in International Cooperation.

At the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation’s Mexico Office, Bissell led the design and implementation of philanthropic strategies for systemic change in the Mexican criminal justice system, and in the provision of public reproductive and maternal health services. Her team designed a regional migration strategy that engaged groups from Central America, Mexico and the United States. She led a four-year $17M USD initiative on birth justice, engaging grassroots groups, national advocacy and legal organizations, and multilateral and UN agencies. In coordination with the Ministry of Health the initiative led to new policies around birth justice and growing recognition of midwives. Under her leadership, the foundation enabled broad ranging support for state-level and national work to address grave human rights violations within the context of Mexico’s current human rights crisis. In 2018 the Foundation’s Mexico office had nearly $20 million USD in active grants to some 70 organizations.

Her conviction and support for trust-based, inclusive philanthropic strategies led her to be nominated Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Fondo Semillas, Mexico’s feminist fund, and in 2019 to co-found Mexico’s newest national fund, Acento, Acción Local, which supports formal and informal movement building and activities for social justice and human rights at the local level.

In the 1990s, Sharon worked at the Information Group on Reproductive Choice, a leading Mexican reproductive justice organization, as a consultant for numerous Mexican feminist organizations and networks, and as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. In 2013, she was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute.

She holds a master’s degree from Tulane University, a bachelor’s degree from Whitman College, and diploma courses in gender, reproductive health and human rights from El Colegio de México and the Universidad Tecnológica de Monterrey in Mexico. She is a dual citizen of Mexico and the United States, and has lived in Mexico since 1995, and lived, studied and worked in the United States (mainland and Puerto Rico), France, and Japan, and speaks English, Spanish and French.