The Rev. Dr. Chloe Breyer

The Rev. Dr. Breyer has served as the Director of the Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) since 2007. During the past decade and a half, ICNY has developed a pioneering curriculum in civics training for grassroots religious leaders, built multi-faith advocacy coalitions preventing bias crimes, and promoted criminal justice and immigration reform. In education, ICNY regularly leads religious diversity training modules for teachers, social workers, law students, and law enforcement officers. In the years following 9/11, ICNY advocated against unwarranted surveillance of mosques and for the restoration of guidelines that safeguard the civil rights and religious freedom of all New Yorkers. In 2015, Rev. Breyer served as a community adviser to the court-appointed facilitator tasked with finding a remedy for police profiling in the “stop and frisk” lawsuits against the NYPD. More recently, Rev. Breyer was one of the clergy advisors on the transition teams of both the incoming Mayor of New York City and the Manhattan District Attorney. She was included in the 12/05/22 Issue of City & State New York’s inaugural “Faith Power 100” list. An Episcopal Priest in the Diocese of New York, Breyer has served at Harlem churches for more than two decades and currently serves at St. Edward-the-Martyr Episcopal Church in East Harlem. In addition to local religious peacemaking work, Rev. Breyer has also participated in interfaith dialogues and humanitarian aid initiatives in Afghanistan and Iran and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of The Close: A Young Woman’s First Year at Seminary (Basic Books 2000) and her op-eds have appeared in Slate, the NY Daily News, the International New York Times (Herald Tribune) and elsewhere. She received her Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in 2017 and her doctoral dissertation focused on interfaith activism, Christian peacemaking, and Islamophobia.