BIO

For over a decade, Brakeyshia has produced engaging research and analyses for today's budget and tax policy debates on local, state, and federal levels. Currently, she works as a senior analyst with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), where she researches and writes about tax policies to inform the public and supports advocates and policymakers with analyses to help secure equitable tax policies, sound fiscal practices, and policy solutions that remedy historical injustices. 

Serving as a researcher for the Cross Cutting Research team at ITEP, means she is supporting the work of the policy teams and tracking multiple tax topics to stay on top of the latest legislative and policy trends. Her main body of work centers on the intersection of race and taxation where she studies how the two affect the economy, society, equity, and government budgets.

She highlights her findings about federal, state, and local tax policies through her public writing and presentations. Throughout her career she has authored essays for Tax Notes, The Huffington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Austin American-Statesman, Human Rights, Bloomberg Tax, and Common Dreams. She’s presented in front of state legislators in Texas, council members in Chicago, The American Bar Association, The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University, The University of MIssouri, and The US Department of State, among others. Her work has garnered the attention of the public, other researchers, and the media.

Previously, she was a senior associate on the Fiscal Federalism Initiative at Pew researching tax policies and public programs at the intersection of the federal-state fiscal relationship. Her research products included analyses of the connection between the rising cost of the student loan interest deduction and student debt, the geographic distribution of federal tax policies, and the federal share of state revenue, among others. She was selected to serve on Pew's inaugural Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (IDE) Council that was composed of staff and senior leadership and created a set of recommendations for the CEO for organization development and staff hiring.

Prior to Pew, she spent two years in Austin, TX, as a state policy fellow with Every Texan (then-named the Center for Public Policy Priorities), through the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' post-graduate research fellowship program. At Every Texan, she conducted data analysis, published reports, blog posts, and op-eds, and presented legislative testimony on Texas' budget and tax policies to describe how policymaker's decisions affected low- and moderate-income families, people of color, and millennials. She was also the lead organizer for Texas Forward, a coalition of over seventy organizations that advocated for fair budget and tax policies in Texas.

She earned her bachelor's degree in history and political science from The University of Texas at Tyler, where she was inducted into Pi Sigma Alpha (National Political Science Honor Society), selected for the Legacy Award and the Dr. Robert and Shirley Jones Leadership Award her senior year and served as a research assistant for two professors within the College of Arts and Sciences (Department of History and Department of Literature and Languages). She was also 1 of 31 students from the entire The University of Texas System selected to complete the system's prestigious Bill Archer Fellowship. As an undergraduate fellow, during the fall semester in 2011, she took classes in Washington, DC and interned at the United States Department of Justice in the Office of Justice Programs.

She has a master's degree in public policy from George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government. While at George Mason, she was one of a few students selected to participate in the Spring 2014 cohort of the President's Student Leadership Seminar. During her time at GMU, she also interned with the Office of U.S. Trade Representative in the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

She is a proud native of Carrollton, Texas.

*All opinions on this website do not reflect the opinions of my employer and other affiliations.*