Julie Polk, Founding Partner

Julie Polk has led storytelling workshops and provided individual consulting for nonprofit advocacy organizations, legal conferences, and law firms around the country, including Legal Services NYC, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association annual conference, and the Florida Public Defender Association, among others. Outside of legal settings, she has led workshops for The Moth, regularly teaches storytelling for journalists at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, created and hosted Story Social, a storytelling open mic in New York City, and served as an adjunct professor of acting and playwriting at Manhattan College. For two years she served as the Curriculum Director for Girls Write Now, a nonprofit that provides one-on-one writing mentorship for girls in underserved NYC high schools, twice distinguished by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities as one of the nation's top after-school programs. At global brand firm Siegel+Gale, she designed messaging platforms and taught writing workshops in the US and Europe for corporate and nonprofit clients including American Express, HP, Aetna, Motorola, Verizon, Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, and the Wharton School of Business. She trained as a classical actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the University of Delaware's Professional Theater Training Program and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School. She earned her certification as a Consent-Forward Artist from Intimacy Directors and Coordinators in December 2023.

Nieve Mooney, Special Programs Coordinator

Nieve Mooney is currently working at Everytown for Gun Safety as their Social Media Associate. She graduated from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2017 where she used elements of anthropology, namely ethnographic investigation, to consider the ways in which narrative can be used to shift power dynamics and create social change. Before joining Rasa in 2017, she spent two years working at the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women as the Chief Women’s Rights Intern and Social Media Coordinator. She is passionate about feminist activism and sustainable social change, and aims to show that in her work at Rasa and elsewhere.

Mary Adkins, Founding Partner (emerita) 

Mary Adkins is a graduate of Yale Law School with a background in writing and storytelling. She teaches storytelling workshops for The Moth and launched the live storytelling series Live Law as part of the public radio project Life of the Law, supported by the National Science Foundation. As an attorney she worked as an associate at Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York City, where she also served as pro bono coordinator. She directed the Domestic Violence Clinic at Yale Law School for two years and won the Florence M. Kelley '37 Prize for her focus on family law. Her legal scholarship has been published in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism. Her non-legal writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate and elsewhere, and her play The 49 Project received the Outstanding Playwriting Award in the 2009 NYC Fringe Festival. As a novelist, she is represented by Claire Anderson-Wheeler at Regal Hoffman & Associates.