• Faculty

Quixada Moore-Vissing

Titles

• Interim Director, Center for Justice Reform
• Visiting Assistant Professor

Degrees

• PhD, Education, University of New Hampshire
• MA, Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• MA, Education (Secondary English Teaching), University of New Hampshire
• BA, Literature and the Avant-Garde, Boston University

---

Biography

Quixada Moore-Vissing is the interim director of the Center for Justice Reform and a visiting assistant professor at VLGS. Her background draws on restorative practices and healing for communities, as well as dialogue and civic engagement. Quixada has worked in both higher education policy and criminal legal system reform spaces. She trained as a practitioner of dialogue with former Freedom Riders from the Civil Rights Movement and has studied peace and reconciliation processes in Northern Ireland as well as Gandhi’s work in India.

Quixada has worked in a range of leadership roles, including leading civic engagement efforts in Chicago for the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, and serving as a racial equity and community engagement council member for the Center for Effective Public Policy’s Advancing Pretrial Policy and Reform Initiative. As a senior leader at Public Agenda, she led the Healthier Democracies project, an initiative that explored how governments around the world are engaging the public in meaningful ways. At Public Agenda she also developed the Quality Conversations Project, an initiative focused on engaging students and faculty in difficult dialogues across difference on their campuses. Through her consulting firm, Public Engagement Partners, she worked with UNICEF on its Child Friendly Cities Initiative, the Seattle Foundation on its Cities of Belonging Initiative, and created a diversity, equity, and inclusion toolkit for Shore Legal Access, a pro bono legal nonprofit.

Quixada has served as a faculty fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy, Salem State University’s Center for Children’s Rights, the University of Maine’s George Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, and the University of Connecticut’s Dodd Center for Human Rights with its Campus Dialogues Initiative. She interned as a graduate student at the Lumina Foundation and worked as a counselor to support higher education access through the New Hampshire Higher Education Assistance Foundation. She has delivered various presentations and written publications about the value of dialogue on higher education campuses, including an essay in the book called Creating Space for Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education. She is also the author on numerous state reports on civic health, including in New Hampshire and Maine.

Quixada earned her PhD in education at the University of New Hampshire, her Master of Arts in Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, her Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of New Hampshire, and her Bachelor’s degree in Literature and Avant-Garde Art from Boston University.

Expertise

• Conflict and Communication
• Restorative Justice

Departments

• Center for Justice Reform