Medea Benjamin was born Susan Benjamin. In college she changed her name to Medea, after the complex figure from Greek mythology. She holds master degrees in both public health and economics, and has spent over twenty years advocating for human rights all over the world. Benjamin worked for ten years in Latin America and Africa as an economist and nutritionist for such organizations as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, and she lived for five years in Cuba. She is the author of ten books, beginning with Bridging the Global Gap: A Handbook to Linking Citizens of the First and Third Worlds (1989), co-authored with Andrea Freedman, and, most recently, War in the Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict (2022), co-authored with Nicolas J. S. Davies.

In 1988, Benjamin, her husband, Kevin Danaher, and Kirsten Moller co-founded Global Exchange, an organization dedicated to promoting fair trade practices where environmental concerns and fair wages for the production of goods take precedence over corporate profits. She has fought against sweatshops, particularly in the garment and shoe industries, and with Global Exchange persuaded corporate giant Nike to investigate and monitor its overseas factories to ensure safe working environments and living wages. Global Exchange helped organize the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization. As of 2024, Global Exchange continues to envision and promote peaceful “people centered globalization.”

After the attacks on September 11, 2001, Benjamin’s activism took on a different tone and color – pink. In 2002, she co-founded CODEPINK: Women for Peace. It’s a “women-run, women-led peace organization,” whose activities range from personal meetings with members of Congress to dressing in pink surgical scrubs and handing out “prescriptions for peace.” Their approach is inventive, often playful, and always in pink, but their goal for peace is serious. Their acts of civil disobedience can be confrontational and often involve members being arrested.

CODEPINK’s members include prominent figures such as Ann Wright and Diane Wilson, but also “regular” women from all over the country. In 2006, Benjamin and CODEPINK brought six Iraqi women (Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd) to the U.S. for International Women’s Day to travel and lobby to end the war. She is co-editor of CODEPINK’s 2006 book, Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism, a collection of essays whose contributors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Helen Thomas, and Arianna Huffington. After more than twenty years, CODEPINK thrives as a vital anti-war organization, with local affiliates across the country, from CODEPINK San Francisco to Divest Chattanooga.

Medea Benjamin has involved herself in the peace and justice movement in a myriad of ways beyond Global Exchange and Code Pink. In 2000, she ran for U.S. Senate (for California) on the Green Party ticket. She helped to bring groups together to form the United for Peace and Justice coalition. With initiatives too numerous to detail, she has opposed war on multiple fronts—including Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine—and advocated extensively against drone warfare. For these continuous extraordinary efforts spanning several decades, she has received many honors, including the Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize, the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation’s Peace Prize, the Gandhi Peace Award, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Peace Leadership Award.