Yoana Kuzmova joined MIRA in 2025 as a Senior Staff Attorney at the recently launched Massachusetts Access to Counsel Initiative (MACI).  

Yoana brings experience representing clients in immigration proceedings and leading advocacy projects across national and international forums. In direct client representation, she previously served as a bilingual staff attorney at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, providing legal services to survivors of sexual violence, and as an immigration attorney at the Northeast Justice Center, where she represented unaccompanied minors, detained clients, and survivors of violence.

More recently, Yoana has taught at the Boston University School of Law International Human Rights Clinic, supervising law students’ projects and teaching trauma-informed client counseling, cross-cultural competency, and coalition building in human rights movements. Her research focuses on citizenship rights, statelessness, and immigration detention in the Caribbean and the Middle East and North Africa. Yoana helped co-found and chairs the board of trustees of the MENA Statelessness Network (Hawiati), whose mission is advocate for the rights of stateless persons across the region and build solidarity among groups of persons deprived of citizenship.  

Yoana holds a J.D. from Boston University School of Law, an M.A. in International Relations from the BU Pardee School of Global Studies. A native of Bulgaria and speaker of Bulgarian, Yoana is also fluent in Spanish and eagerly learning Arabic and Russian.