As BCWK’s Legal Director from 2018-2025 and Waterkeeper from 2021-2025, and now as Co-Executive Director, Kristen has innovated the organization’s approach to environmental lawyering to center the voices and priorities of communities impacted by water injustices and shift litigation goals toward longer-term policy change. Kristen has developed new streams of legal work for that have shaped BCWK’s advocacy, including leveraging sewage enforcement actions to mandate billions of dollars of overdue water infrastructure investment; aiding community-led ecosystem protection through legal research and action and exposing the need for further local and regional policy solutions; and, most recently, addressing localized sources of industrial water pollution as an approach to coastal resilience. Kristen has served as the organization’s Interim Executive Director twice and led internal work to deepen BCWK’s commitment to its organizational values of justice and equity. Kristen previously worked at Susman Godfrey LLP and Irvine & Conner PLLC and clerked for two federal judges. She graduated with high honors from Tulane Law School, with a certificate in Environmental Law, and from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Linguistics and History, focusing her studies on Brazilian social and environmental justice movements.

Kristen was honored as a Peacemaker by the Houston Peace and Justice Center in 2023; nominated for the Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Public Justice Foundation in 2022; awarded the Advancement in Animal Law Award by the Animal Legal Defense Fund in 2017; and named a Rising Star in Environmental Litigation by Texas Super Lawyers multiple years in a row. Kristen was an inaugural member of the Just Transitions Lawyering Cohort, is a Texas Gulf Coast Master Naturalist, and previously served on the local board of New Leaders Council, the regional group of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, and the Houston advisory group for the Texas Civil Rights Project.