Vanessa Southern

Who is Vanessa Southern?

Vanessa Rush Southern is an American Unitarian minister in New Jersey notable for increasing church membership as well as being a progressive liberal advocate of issues such as reproductive health care options for women, diversity and racial tolerance, affordable housing including projects for Habitat for Humanity, human rights, and remembrance of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King. She is minister of the Unitarian Church in Summit and has presided over high-profile weddings as well as local community discussions on topics such as diversity and tolerance and the "achievement gap" between low–income and high–income families. Her father was the director of an acting school in New York City called the School for Film and Television and her mother was a hematology technologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She was married in 1999 to Rohit Menzes. She wrote a book entitled, This Piece of Eden.