Shenna Bellows

Shenna Lee Bellows (born March 23, 1975) is an American politician and civil rights advocate who has served as the 50th Secretary of State of Maine since January 2021. She is the first woman to hold this position. Before entering politics, Bellows worked as a civil rights advocate, serving as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maine from 2005 to 2013 and later as executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine from 2018 to 2020.

Bellows served in the Maine Senate from 2016 to 2020, representing the 14th district. She was the Maine Democratic Party nominee in the 2014 United States Senate election in Maine, losing to incumbent Republican Susan Collins, by over 30%. As Secretary of State, Bellows gained national attention in December 2023 when she ruled that Donald Trump was ineligible for Maine's Republican primary ballot due to his role in the January 6 United States Capitol attack, a decision later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. In March 2025, she announced her candidacy for Governor of Maine in the 2026 Maine gubernatorial election.

Shenna Bellows was born on March 23, 1975, in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Dexter Bellows, a carpenter, and Janice Colson, a nurse. She was raised in Hancock, Maine, where she attended Hancock Grammar School. According to Bellows, her family experienced economic hardship during her childhood, living without running water or electricity until she was in fifth grade.

At age 15, Bellows participated in the AFS–USA foreign exchange program in Campos, Brazil. She graduated from Ellsworth High School in 1993 and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Middlebury College. During high school and college, she worked as a research assistant at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, contributing to published research on marine fish physiology. During her junior year at Middlebury, she studied abroad for a semester in San José, Costa Rica.

Bellows served as executive director of the ACLU of Maine for eight years. In that role, she built coalitions with both Republicans and Democrats to pass privacy and civil rights laws. She was a leader of Mainers United for Marriage, working for seven years to pass same-sex marriage in Maine. She was a leader on voting rights and co-chaired the 2011 Protect Maine Votes campaign to restore same day voter registration. Most recently, she organized a successful privacy campaign to require warrants for access to private cell phone communications, and she led the opposition to warrantless drone surveillance.

During her time at the ACLU, Bellows was a leader in the Maine Choice Coalition and the Coalition for Maine Women. She was recognized for her work to advance women’s health and reproductive choice by awards from the University of Maine Women’s Studies Department, Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center, the American Association of University Women, the Frances Perkins Center and the Maine Democratic Party.

Prior to her work at the ACLU of Maine, Bellows was the national field organizer at the ACLU in Washington, D.C., organizing nationwide civil liberties campaigns including opposition to the Patriot Act, where she built broad coalitions that included librarians and gun owners alike.

Bellows was an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in Nashville, Tennessee. There she assisted a start-up non-profit, Community IMPACT! in developing an asset building program to promote educational and economic empowerment for young people in Nashville’s largest public housing project.