Judy Berman · 2026 Honoree

In 2019, when the Capitol Hill Village was searching for an executive director, several members were familiar with Judy Berman from her work with the DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. Among other responsibilities there, she led the Center’s workforce development project. Discovering that Judy was a long-time resident of Capitol Hill seemed like a sign. Members of the Board’s Advocacy Committee encouraged her to apply, and she was offered and accepted the job leading what has become one of the Hill’s most vital organizations.

Looking back on it now, Judy sees her career as having been “buffeted by the wind in the best possible way.” She grew up in Ardsley, a comfortable suburb of New York City with lots of outdoor space and good schools. She played the piano and ran track. In high school she was chosen to participate in a program where students made up their own English and history curricula (on her English reading list was a classic of the day, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”). At Williams College and Brown University, and later as a grad student at UC Berkeley, she continued her study of literature and its relation to the society that produced it, eventually writing a thesis on 19th century political subjectivity in pre-Civil War America.

But even as she was working toward a doctorate, her attention was being drawn in other directions—toward social justice issues relating to women and incarceration. Soon after being awarded her Ph.D., Judy moved from California across the country to Washington, DC. to work on a domestic violence prevention project at the Center for Effective Public Policy in Silver Spring. She told herself that she would return to California after this work was complete.

While volunteering in the Youth Garden at the National Arboretum, Judy met the man who would become her husband, Felix Nienstadt, a cartographer working at the Department of Defense in geospatial intelligence. She did not return to California. She moved into Felix’s house on Capitol Hill, where they settled happily and raised their two children, Amalia and Levi. Judy continued her career at DC Appleseed, working on local public policy.

Judy’s time at Capitol Hill Village began dramatically with the challenges of COVID-19, which shut down in-person get-togethers and introduced the Zoom meetings, which, while initially daunting, have become a valued tool. Judy has moved decisively to connect with the Village’s almost 500 members and to refine and augment the organization’s many and varied ways of serving them.

Judy credits her father, now 98 and living in Florida, as an inspiration. A physician, he was a man of compassion and generosity who was interested in issues relating to aging. “When I help people,” Judy reflects, “I am thinking of my dad, wanting to do for others some of what he has done.”