The daughter of a U.S. Naval Chief, Maya spent her childhood moving around the United States and witnessed first-hand the disrespect of various races, socioeconomic classes, and cultural values. In Hawaii, she observed how prejudice of Pacific Islanders impacted people of darker skin complexions. In Pennsylvania, she was surrounded by gun violence and low-economic hardships that took over her peers’ lives in the city of Harrisburg. In Virginia, during elementary school, she fell victim to the hands of informal segregation through school zoning. It was in December 2014, that she laid on the ground with 100 other Black students on the campus of George Mason University, in an effort to draw attention to the crimes being committed daily at the hands of the police. This first peaceful act of defiance for civil rights fed an obsession to understand institutional inequalities, building on upon the inequalities she had witnessed throughout her young age. 

As recent Phi Beta Kappa graduate of George Mason University, she also received the Black Scholar the Year Award demonstrating her commitment to her academics and the civil rights of the black Mason community. Maya’s passion for juvenile justice stems from her childhood traveling the country as a military child and her time as a camp counselor. She recently completed an internship at the Public Defender Service in the District of Columbia and aspires to become a juvenile public defender, with the ultimate goal of starting a non-profit focused on juvenile incarceration rehabilitation and policy reform. Maya is pursuing her JD at UCLA School of Law where she is a David J. Epstein Public Interest Law and Policy Scholar.