Jenny Durkan

Jenny Anne Durkan (born May 19, 1958) is an American attorney, former federal prosecutor, and politician who served as the 56th mayor of Seattle, Washington. She is the daughter of Martin Durkan. Durkan is a member of the Democratic Party. After earning her Juris Doctor from University of Washington School of Law in 1985, Durkan began practicing law as a criminal defense lawyer and civil litigator. In October 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington. She held that position until September 2014.

Durkan was elected the 56th mayor of Seattle in 2017, becoming the city's first female mayor since the 1920s, its second openly LGBT elected mayor, and first elected mayor born in Seattle. She took first place in the nonpartisan August primary and defeated urban planner and political activist Cary Moon in the November general election. She and her partner, Dana Garvey, have two sons.

Durkan was criticized for her response to the George Floyd protests in Seattle and her handling of protesters and law enforcement in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. In December 2020, she announced that she would not seek reelection after the end of her mayoral term.

Jenny Durkan was born in Seattle on May 19, 1958. She was raised in a large Irish Catholic family of eight siblings. The family lived on Mercer Island in the mid-1950s and Bellevue in the early 1960s, before settling in rural Issaquah during a time "when there [wasn't] any development." Her father, Martin Durkan, was a prominent Seattle-area lawyer, Democratic legislator, and lobbyist whose career included 16 years in the state Senate and two unsuccessful runs for governor. Her mother was primarily a homemaker who supported her husband's career, though she eventually became an executive editor of the Ballard News-Tribune and wrote editorials.

Durkan attended Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a private Catholic girls' school in Washington State. She spent part of her junior year of high school as an exchange student in London and said that "the best part of the experience was traveling through England to Scotland, France, Austria, Switzerland and Germany." A high-school classmate of Durkan's remembers her as "super independent, and rough-and-tumble…strong-willed and adventurous."

Durkan earned her B.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1980. At Notre Dame, she tried out for the basketball team before being cut and ending up as the team's statistician.

After graduating, Durkan spent two years in Alaska, teaching high-school English and coaching a girls' basketball team in the Yup’ik Eskimo community through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. After a summer working as a baggage handler for Wien Air Alaska in St. Mary's, Alaska as a dues-paying Teamster, Durkan enrolled in the University of Washington School of Law, earning her J.D. degree in 1985. "I wanted to be a lawyer since I was 5 years old," she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1992. "When I graduated from law school, my mother said, 'Finally someone is going to pay you to argue."'

While in law school, Durkan participated in a pilot criminal defense clinic, working with the public defender's office to represent individuals charged in Seattle municipal court. She continued the work on a pro bono basis, until she moved to Washington, D.C. to practice law with the firm of Williams & Connolly.