| Representative Rebecca Kislak (D) was first elected to represent District 4 in Providence in November 2018. She is the second vice chair of the House Education Committee and is a member of the House Environment and Natural Resources Committee, the House Health and Human Services Committee, and the House Innovation, Internet and Technology Committee.
Representative Kislak has been an outspoken supporter of Providence's public schools, and works to advance health equity, economic justice, and the environment. She successfully advocated for the Rhode Island Parentage Act, legislation that made Rhode Island law more inclusive to recognize the many ways people become families, and sponsored a subsequent streamlining of adoption laws to better protect families with children born through assisted reproduction. In 2024, she sponsored a law to give families more control over changes in individualized education plans (IEPs) and set in motion an overhaul of regulations governing the IEP process. She was the sponsor of the law that created a permanent commission to promote and continually improve genocide and Holocaust education in schools.
She has backed several laws to protect Rhode Islanders' health care rights by enacting them at the state level in case the federal Affordable Care Act is ever repealed, including a 2024 law she sponsored that prohibits annual and lifetime insurance limits and a law she cosponsored protecting many of the ACA's consumer-protection provisions. In 2024, she was the sponsor of legislation enacted to clear barriers to prescription drugs that prevent HIV.
To help Rhode Island meet its commitments under the Act on Climate, she has been working on efforts to address carbon emissions from buildings. She led a successful effort to restrict the use of neonicotinoids in pesticides.
Representative Kislak is an attorney with years of experience in law and policy. She is a Law and Policy Consultant with MLPB, was a founding attorney of the Medical-Legal Partnership at Community Legal Aid in Worcester, and director of the Rhode Island Medical-Legal Partnership at Rhode Island Legal Services. She also served as Policy Director and Counsel at the Rhode Island Health Center Association, and has worked as a consultant for health care and non-profit organizations. She teaches health policy courses as an adjunct professor at Rhode Island College and Brown University.
She earned a bachelor's degree from Brown University in 1995 and graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 2000. She is married to Dr. Joanna Brown. |