Representative Rebecca Kislak
Second Vice Chair, House Education Committee
Member, House Environment and Natural Resources Committee
Member, House Health and Human Services Committee
Member, House Innovation, Internet and Technology Committee
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, health equity, and
economic justice. In 2021, Representative Kislak sponsored a
law creating a permanent commission to promote and continually improve genocide
and Holocaust education in schools. 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 2022, she
led a successful effort to restrict the use of neonicotinoids in
pesticides, and she continues to work on an effort to join the majority
of states in adopting national standards for e-bikes and
legislation to improve the legal infrastructure for bicycle
transportation. In 2023, she introduced the
Green Buildings Act, which aims to create energy performance
standards based on the size of buildings, and cosponsored a new law that
now protects many of the
consumer-protection aspects of the federal Affordable Care Act in Rhode
Island by enacting them at the state level.
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.