“… charismatic … a gifted storyteller …”
The Washington Post
Tiniest Bio
Twanna A. Hines, M.S. is an award-winning sexual health educator, communications strategist, and a human-risk / digital-safeguarding consultant. Her career spans more than 20 years, three continents, and audiences from corporate boardrooms to international policy convenings.
Tinier Bio
Twanna A. Hines, M.S. (she/her) is an award-winning sexual health educator, communications strategist, and digital-safeguarding consultant. Through her work, she counters democratic backsliding. As a practitioner with a track record spanning 20+ years and three continents, she works in sexual and reproductive health, anti-racism, and civic-space protection. In 2005, she founder her social impact consultancy, FUNKY BROWN CHICK, Inc. to help nonprofits, foundations, CSOs, and other organizations build their narrative muscles and counter coordinated disinformation.
Tiny Bio
Twanna A. Hines, M.S. is an award-winning sexual health educator, communications strategist, and digital-safeguarding consultant. Her career spans more than 20 years and three continents. She has supported reproductive justice, anti-racism, and civic-space protection.
Previous roles include staff positions at University of Chicago, Planned Parenthood, Newsweek, the U.S. Department of State at the American Embassy in The Hague, and Fortune 500 companies. She’s the founder of FUNKY BROWN CHICK, Inc., a social impact consultancy that supports nonprofits, foundations, CSOs, and other organizations by offering digital safeguarding and countering coordinated disinformation campaigns.
Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, NBC News, Al Jazeera, Fast Company, and 25+ other outlets; she has been covered by The New York Times, CNN, Cosmopolitan, Essence, Vox, and 50+ additional media outlets. She has been called “a gifted storyteller” by The Washington Post. She speaks, writes, facilitates, and consults from Lisbon, Portugal, and Washington, D.C.
Full Bio
Twanna A. Hines, M.S. (she/her) is an award-winning sexual health educator, communications strategist, and digital-safeguarding. She has spent more than 20 years working in behavioral science, storytelling, and culture.
She worked as a marketing communications professional at Newsweek, where she supported the magazine’s global editorial relationships.
In 2005, she founded FUNKY BROWN CHICK, Inc. Having grown to an 11-person social impact consultancy, it help nonprofits, foundations, CSOs, and other organizations counter disinformation and build their narrative capabilities.
Working across sexual and reproductive health, climate justice, anti-racism, immigration, and civic engagement, the firm’s clients collectively manage over $655 million in programming budgets. Campaigns have moved over 900,000+ people, delivered 4X fundraising return on investment, and achieved newsletter open rates of 60–77% against a 15–25% sector average. With staff across the US and EU, FUNKY BROWN CHICK, Inc. has been fiscally sponsorsed by Fractured Atlas for more than a decade.
As the first Black American woman with a nationally syndicated sex column, she reached 1.7 million readers through her column at Metro international newspapers. She has also written and performed two sold-out, critically acclaimed one-woman theater shows, and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, NBC News, Al Jazeera, Fast Company, and 25+ other outlets. Her co-authored white paper Three Acts of Justice, developed with a Harvard University collaborator, provided a rights-based reproductive justice framework years before the threats it identified materialized. Published in 2024, it directly references the same democratic backsliding she now tracks.
A sought-after speaker, she has spoken at Harvard University, SXSW, Northwestern University, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, the Museum of Sex, Soho House, and elsewhere across the United States, Europe, and Latin America. She has been featured in CNN, Cosmopolitan, Essence, Vox, and 50+ additional media outlets.
Committed to combatting violence, she is a member of the Truman National Security Project and has volunteered with Tribeca Film Festival, Democrats Abroad, and the Amnesty International Film Festival.
She holds an M.S. in Sociology from Florida State University, a B.S. from Illinois State University, where she was inducted into the Steve and Sandi Adams Legacy Hall of Fame. She completed post-graduate studies at New York University and Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Having previously lived in New York City, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, The Hague, and Washington, D.C., she is fluent in English and Dutch, with working proficiency in Portuguese. She currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal.
Raised in the cornfields of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, she penned her first op-ed at age 17. Written for her hometown newspaper, The Daily Pantagraph, it was a letter to the editor about why sports are good for girls.
(See also: resume)