Tonya serves as Vice Chair and General Counsel – Legal, Regulatory and Compliance at KPMG LLP, in addition to serving on the Board of Directors for the National Women’s Law Center. Before joining KPMG, Tonya served as the Acting General Counsel and Principal Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as Special Assistant to President Obama for Justice and Regulatory Policy at the White House, and was a partner at the international law firm WilmerHale LLP.
Tonya’s practice at WilmerHale focused primarily on complex civil litigation and investigations, including Congressional investigations, as well as discrete civil rights matters. Tonya started her legal career as a judicial clerk for the Honorable Francis D. Murnaghan, Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Following her clerkship, she joined Wilmer (then Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering), where she worked on a range of litigation matters, including the ground-breaking University of Michigan affirmative action cases, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. She left Wilmer in 2001 (and later returned) to work as counsel to then-Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, where she focused on a mix of legal and policy issues, including corporate governance matters. Her work for then-Senator Biden marked Tonya’s fourth stint on Capitol Hill, having earlier worked as a legislative aide to Senator Terry Sanford (NC), Congressman David Price (NC), and Congressman Lloyd Doggett (TX).
Tonya holds a BA in Public Policy Studies and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from Duke University,a JD from Harvard Law School, and a postgraduate degree in African Studies from the University of Cape Town in South Africa as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar.