Micah Bornfree né White is the lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries and 1,000 cities in 2011, while he was an editor of Adbusters magazine.

He is the author of The End of Protest which has been translated into German and Greek. His essays have been published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Globe and Mail and beyond. He has been profiled by the New Yorker, Esquire and more.

He is the co-founder of Activist School, an online school taught by, and for, activists. 

Micah Bornfree has delivered more than thirty lectures at prestigious universities (including Princeton and Yale), cultural festivals and private events in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands, the United States and elsewhere. 

Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation, Bornfree has been profiled by NPR's Morning Edition, The New Yorker and The Guardian. In recognition of his contributions, Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today.

He has been awarded the Roddenberry Fellowship, the Voqal Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at Bard College and the Activist-in-Residence Fellowship at UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Micah White has a twenty year record of innovative activism, including co-creating Occupy Wall Street, conceiving the debt forgiveness tactic used by the Rolling Jubilee and RIP Medical Debt, popularizing the critique of clicktivism and identifying the emerging trend of "social movement warfare." 

White's first book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published in 2016 by Knopf Canada. The End of Protest has been translated into German and Greek. White's essays and interviews on the future of protest have been published internationally in periodicals including The New York Times, The Guardian, Folha de São Paulo, The Washington Post, Poder (Brazil) and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been a featured guest on major network television shows such as Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, the BBC's Newsnight and The National, Canada’s flagship nightly current affairs broadcast.

As a teenage activist he was awarded Americans United's Religious Liberty Award, the ACLU of Michigan’s Wendy Joyrich Award, the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Ruth Jokinen Student Activist Memorial Award, and the ACLU of Greater Flint Michigan's Civil Libertarian of The Year Award. In college he sparked the nationwide Diebold Electronic Civil Disobedience. 

White received his MA and PhD (summa cum laude) in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland where he studied with leading philosophers Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek and Avital Ronell.  He holds a BA in Philosophy with a minor in Film and Media Studies and a minor in Interpretation Theory from Swarthmore College. 

Micah White lives with his spouse, Chi Rainer Bornfree, and two children in the Hudson Valley of New York.

In 2016, he ran for Mayor of Nehalem, a rural city on the Oregon coast, an effort that was covered by Fusion, The Guardian and NPR.

In 2017, Micah was a Fulani Fellow at the All Stars Project in New York City where he worked with Dr. Lenora Fulani, the first woman to run for president of the United States and get on the ballot in all 50 states. As a Fulani Fellow he studied the revolutionary potential of electoral social movements.

In 2018, Micah was awarded the Roddenberry Fellowship and Voqal Fellowship to create Activist Graduate School. He was also named the National Endowment for the Humanities / Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Bard College where he co-taught a seminar on social activism.

In 2019, Micah was appointed Activist-in-Residence at UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy where he co-taught a seminar on Housing Justice Activism and Protest.

Some of Micah’s Talks