Dr. Pittman is an Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the Joff Hanauer Honors Professor in Western Civilization and has an appointment in the Department of Sociology. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University. Before coming to the University of Washington, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. In 2011, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dr. Pittman’s book Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First Century Story of Love, Coercion and Survival explores the complex lives of Black grandmothers raising their grandchildren in skipped-generation households. Prioritizing the voices of Black grandmothers through in-depth interviews and ethnographic research at various sites, Dr. Pittman showcases a fundamental change in the relationship between grandmother and grandchild as grandmothers confront the paradox of fulfilling the social and legal functions of motherhood without the legal rights of the role. This compelling work illuminates the strategies used by grandmothers to manage their legal marginalization vis-à-vis parents and the state across a range of caregiving arrangements. In doing so, it reveals the overwhelming and painful decisions Black grandmothers must make to ensure the safety and well-being of the next generation.

Broadly, Dr. Pittman’s research focuses on the coping experiences of socially marginalized women, including Black women raising a second and third generation, and those living with poor health outcomes. Her other research interests include race, class, gender, and aging; poverty; Black families; research methods; public policy; Black digital studies; and health disparities.

Dr. Pittman’s scholarship has been published in diverse venues, including in Generations Journal of American Society on Aging, Genealogy, Health Equity, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Social Science and Medicine, City and Community, and Women, Gender, and Families of Color. Her research on grandparent caregiving and African American families has also been featured in the following edited volumes: Mothering and Motherwork in the Time of Black Lives Matter, Relational Poverty Politics!, Health Care for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Across the Lifespan, and The African American Experience: Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

It has also been featured in numerous media outlets, including USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, PBS's “To the Contrary,” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Generations United, Early Learning Nation, Reach Out and Read, After the Kids Move In, and the National Caucus and Center on Black Aging.

Her work has been funded by various fellowships and grants at the University of Washington, an ACLS Digital Justice Grant, a 4Culture Heritage Projects grant, the Cambia Health Foundation, an Institute for Citizens and Scholars Career Enhancement Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, National Poverty Center (Ford Foundation), Institute for Research on Poverty, and the Administration for Children and Families, among others. 

She is the founder and director of the Black Digital Humanities Project—The Black Grandmother Archive — and the co-founder and director of the Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library. Both projects aim to repair what we are taught about Black grandmothers, to reclaim their narratives and culture using firsthand accounts, and to preserve their legacies.

Dr. Pittman is a certified yoga and mindfulness meditation teacher and teaches mindfulness meditation classes to kinship caregivers (and others). In 2022, she was inducted into the Mind and Life Institute Fellow Program, where she engages and collaborates “with a global network of influential leaders committed to contemplative scholarship and practice.”