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 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 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level in case the federal Affordable Care Act is ever repealed, including a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.