Governor JB Pritzker and Skye Perryman in Conversation

Named as one of the 2025 100 Most Influential People In The World by TIME Magazine, Skye Perryman is a nationally recognized lawyer and leader. She serves as the President and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan national legal organization that promotes democracy and progress through litigation, regulatory engagement, policy education, and research. Ms. Perryman took the helm at Democracy Forward a few months after January 6, 2021, in the midst of rising extremism in communities and courts across the country. She has built a visionary team of legal, policy, and communications experts to confront anti-democratic extremism head-on while also using the law to advance progress and a bold vision for the future. 

Under Ms. Perryman’s leadership, Democracy Forward has expanded the scope and reach of its work, emerging as a nationally recognized institution that is taking on the most significant issues affecting people, families, and communities. Since January 20, Democracy Forward has filed and won court orders that protect the American people from harmful and unlawful federal executive action, including securing a nationwide order stopping the freeze on funding and essential services, protecting religious liberty, blocking unauthorized access to American's data at the Social Security Administration, and opposing attempts to undermine public education. She has developed unique bipartisan collaborations that include faith, business, labor, and civil rights organizations and spent months building Democracy 2025, a coalition that is now 650 organizations strong, to ensure swift legal challenges and responses to governmental actions that threaten people and our democracy. Democracy Forward’s work in state and local communities include efforts to defend access to women’s reproductive health, safeguard health care privacy, and protect access to public libraries and educational institutions.

Prior to taking the helm at Democracy Forward, Ms. Perryman served as the General Counsel of the American College of Obstetricians, the nation’s largest organization of physicians dedicated to the health of women. There, she oversaw legal and policy strategies that resulted in historic advancements in access to health care for women, including developing strategies to support the extension of postpartum Medicaid coverage for more than 500,000 people, overseeing litigation that enabled the distribution of mifepristone by mail for the first time in U.S. history, and launching an industry-wide effort to promote racial equity in medicine. Prior to ACOG, Skye was a member of the founding litigation team at Democracy Forward, and earlier in her career practiced law at Covington & Burling and WilmerHale.