Phyllis Zagano

Zagano's scholarship and work as a theologian has been recognized by both awards and critical engagement. She received "Layperson of the Year" award from Voice of the Faithful in 2012. She received the Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice from the Paulist Center of Boston in 2014. Two years later, in 2016, Pope Francis appointed Zagano to the Papal Study Commission on the Women's Diaconate. Prior to disputing with her ideas, Crisis Magazine described Zagano as "one of the most high-ranking feminists in the Catholic Church" in 2019.

Beginning in 2008, she has regularly donated her papers to the Women and Leadership Archives of Loyola University Chicago.

Since 2002, Zagano has taught at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, where she is senior research associate-in-residence and adjunct professor of religion. In 2005 she held a visiting professorship at the Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2009, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Limerick's Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, Ireland, where she was a lecturer. In 2015 she was a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Waterford Institute of Technology, in Waterford, Ireland.

Zagano was program officer at the National Humanities Center from 1979 to 1980, and taught at Fordham University from 1980 to 1984. She was a researcher at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York from 1984 to 1986 and a Coolidge Fellow at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1987. She taught at Boston University from 1988 to 1999.

Phyllis Zagano (born August 25, 1947) is an American author and academic. She has written and spoken on the role of women in the Roman Catholic Church and is an advocate for the ordination of women as deacons. Her writings have been variously translated into Indonesian, Czech, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Zagano was born in Queens, New York in 1947. She graduated from Sacred Heart Academy in 1965. She has a BA from Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York (1969); master's degrees in communications from Boston University (1970), in literature from Long Island University (1972), and in theology from St. John's University (1991); and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1979.