Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born May 5, 1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.

Crenshaw is known for introducing and developing intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Her work further expands to include intersectional feminism, which is a sub-category related to intersectional theory. Intersectional feminism examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face due to their ethnicity, sexuality, and economic background.