Julie Menin was elected Speaker of the New York City Council on January 7, 2026. An attorney, civic leader, three-time City Commissioner, and former small business owner, Speaker Menin has over three decades of experience in the public and private sectors.
Speaker Menin has proudly represented District 5, which includes parts of the Upper East Side and all of Roosevelt Island, in the Council since January 2022. During her first two terms, the Council passed her legislation to advance universal child care, create an Office of Healthcare Accountability to rein in excessive prices, ease burdens on small businesses by creating a one-shop-stop web portal for city licenses, codify the right to reproductive health care services, and more.
At the same time, Speaker Menin has effectively addressed a full range of constituent issues, including sanitation and rat-mitigation concerns, street safety, unlicensed smoke shops, robust capital funding for district parks and schools, and access to low-cost internet for NYCHA residents.
Prior to her election to the City Council, Speaker Menin served as the city’s 2020 Census Director, successfully advocating against the Trump Administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question and achieving a historic result by finishing first among all major cities. Because of this effort, New York City will be receiving its fair share over the next decade of over $1.5 trillion in federal funding for public schools, affordable housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and other vital programs.
As Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs, Speaker Menin reinvigorated the agency by increasing consumer restitution by 70 percent while instituting 25 reforms to lower onerous fines on small businesses where there was no consumer harm. Also under her leadership, the agency implemented the City’s historic Paid Sick Leave Law, launched a new Earned Income Tax Credit initiative that resulted in over $260 million being returned to low-income New Yorkers, and conducted trailblazing investigations into industries preying on New Yorkers, such as for-profit colleges. She also launched an investigation into a major online firearms marketer to determine if NYC-based sellers were using this website to advertise and illegally sell second-hand guns without DCA licenses, thereby skirting City, State, and federal laws.
Speaker Menin has led innovative public-private partnerships with the Gray Foundation to address critical needs across New York City. As Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs, she spearheaded the creation of NYC Kids RISE, a nonprofit she helped found, which has now grown college savings accounts totaling more than $44 million for 280,000 public school kindergarteners. She partnered with Asphalt Green to launch Wave Makers, a free swim pilot program providing 2,000 second graders with swim lessons near their home. Speaker Menin also led a groundbreaking initiative with the Museum of Jewish Heritage to combat antisemitism, bringing 85,000 New York City public and charter school students to the museum for Holocaust education experiences.
Speaker Menin also previously served as Commissioner of Media and Entertainment, where she brought TV and film production to an all-time record for the city creating thousands of jobs and significant revenue for New York. Speaker Menin launched new programs to increase women’s representation and opportunities in film, TV, theater and the music industry, such as the first-ever women’s film fund, job training programs to increase gender equity in the film, theater, TV and music industries, and a slate of new women’s programming on the city’s TV channels. Speaker Menin also negotiated the historic deal to bring the Grammy Awards back to New York in 2017, resulting in a $200 million economic benefit for New York City.
Before becoming a Commissioner, Speaker Menin served as the seven-year Chair of Manhattan Community Board 1 where she helped lead Lower Manhattan’s resurgence after 9/11. Several weeks after her small business was badly damaged on 9/11, she founded the not-for-profit organization Wall Street Rising, which focused on the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan for residents and small businesses, ultimately developing it into an organization with over 30,000 members. She served as a board member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the 9/11 Memorial Jury, and the 9/11 Memorial Board and was one of the founding board members of the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center (The Perelman Center). She was credited for her solution-based leadership after 9/11 including building three new schools downtown, advocating for the creation of the WTC Health Registry to provide for healthcare for first responders and residents, pushing for the successful creation of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center to centralize and manage 60 active construction projects on and near Ground Zero, and successfully leading the charge to move the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed from Lower Manhattan.
Before her career in public service, Speaker Menin practiced law as a regulatory attorney at Wiley, Rein & Fielding, a large law firm in Washington D.C., and as the Senior Regulatory Counsel at Colgate-Palmolive where she played a lead role in numerous agency cases involving the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission, and also litigated disputes in state and federal courts. She has served on the board of the Women’s Campaign Fund, where she helped launch She Should Run, a nationwide initiative that has encouraged thousands of women to run for elected office and served on the board of Eleanor’s Legacy, an organization in New York focused on electing more Democratic women statewide. In addition, she has served on the boards of the Downtown Hospital, Citizens Union, the Municipal Arts Society, the September 11th Memorial Foundation, the WTC Performing Arts Center, and the National Advisory Board for Public Service at Harvard University, and the board of trustees of Columbia University.
Speaker Menin also served as an adjunct professor at Columbia, teaching on city and state government, focusing on how cities can take the lead in the face of deregulation. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University and received her law degree from Northwestern University School of Law.
Speaker Menin is honored to represent the neighborhood that her mother and grandmother settled in, known as Little Hungary, after surviving the Holocaust and escaping from Hungary. Speaker Menin is a proud mom and resides in Yorkville with her husband and children.