Vanessa Zoltan
Quick Facts
Biography
Vanessa Zoltan is a humanist chaplain who describes herself as an "atheist chaplain". She is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and holds a BA in English and writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and a MS in nonprofit management from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been called one of "few" feminist humanist chaplains in the world.
She is Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University along with lead chaplain Greg Epstein. Epstein and Zoltan are also chaplains for an off-campus atheist-agnostic community group called Humanist Hub founded c. 1985.
Zoltan has delivered talks on interpretation of works such as Jane Eyre and Harry Potter as sacred texts.
Zoltan, who stated on CNN that all four of her grandparents were Auschwitz survivors, has said she self-identifies as "an atheist and a Jew and a humanist".