She holds a PhD in Political Geography and Social Theory from Rutgers University. She is a leading figure in prison abolition, racial capitalism and the study of the interrelations between space, institutions and political economy that shape and define incarceration. She is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and American Studies and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean.

She is co-founder of several organisations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Gilmore is the author of the award-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press, 2007). Her other publications include Geografía de la abolición. Ensayos sobre espacio, raza, cárceles y emancipación social (Virus, 2024).

Among other distinctions, she has received the American Studies Association’s Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012), the American Association of Geographers’ Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014) and, in 2020, the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize, alongside Angela Y. Davis and Mike Davis.