About Me
Selected Bio
Tawana Petty aka Honeycomb is a mother, social justice organizer, poet, author, and facilitator. Her work focuses on racial justice, equity, privacy, and consent. She is a 2023-2025 Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council, a 2024 National LIO Yearlong Fellow with the Rockwood Leadership Institute and she serves on the CS (computer science) for Detroit Steering Committee.
She is the founding Executive Director of Petty Propolis, Inc., a Black women-led artist incubator primarily focused on cultivating visionary resistance through policy literacy and advocacy, data and digital privacy education, and racial justice and equity initiatives.
Petty is an alumni fellow of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford PACS, the Detroit Equity Action Lab, and Art Matters Foundation. She also convened the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition from 2016 through 2024.
Petty is a former co-lead of Our Data Bodies and has previously served as Data Justice Director for the Detroit Community Technology Project, National Organizing Director at Data for Black Lives and Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Algorithmic Justice League.
She has been honored with several awards. Selected honors include a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition and Wayne State University’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies Peacemaker Award in 2018. In 2021, she was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. In 2023, Petty was honored with the AI Policy Leader in Civil Society Award by the Center for AI and Digital Policy, the Ava Jo Silent Shero Award by the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion, with a Racial Justice Leadership Award by the Detroit People's Platform and with a Legacy Award from Sandy's Land, LLC. And in 2024, she was named on Business Insider's AI Power List in Ethics.