Julie Ciccolini

Julie is the CEO of Techtivist, a software firm dedicated to empowering human rights activists.  After a decade building technology to advance human rights, Julie founded Techtivist to fill a critical need in the community for technical solutions that drive meaningful change.

Previously, Julie was an inaugural member of the Digital Investigations Lab at Human Rights Watch, a first-of-its-kind initiative to apply emerging technology to bolster remote investigations into human rights abuses in over 90 countries.

In her prior role at The Legal Aid Society, Julie designed software to identify and expose police misconduct, which prevented numerous wrongful convictions and sparked a movement to reform police secrecy. She co-launched a public database of misconduct in New York which ignited a successful challenge to a statewide police secrecy law.  Her work on criminal justice additionally contributed to the repeal of three laws that discriminated against people of color and queer individuals.

In 2020, Julie joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as the Director of Law Enforcement Accountability. There, she created and directed The Full Disclosure Project to help organizations across the country use her software to expose police misconduct in their states. The project established seven statewide databases of misconduct collectively tracking records on over 150,000 officers from nearly 2,000 agencies.

Julie is a sought out subject matter expert on police accountability, has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, NPR, CNN, and was recently named Columbia University Graduate School's "Most Outstanding Recent Alumni."