Gail Lewis was until recently  Reader in Psychosocial Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, and is a psychotherapist having trained at the Tavistock Clinic. She has worked at the Open University and Lancaster University.

Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. Among her political and scholarly concerns are the formation of and resistance to gendered-racilised social formations; the relationship between the organisational psychodynamics and the lived experience of racialised and gendered inequality in organisations; and how to bring black feminist, psychoanalytic and sociological understandings of subjectivity into creative dialogue in the interests of generating ‘practice against the grain’.

She was a long standing member of Brixton Black Women's Group and a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD). She has been a member of the editorial collectives of the European Journal of Women's Studies and Feminist Review. She has published on feminism; intersectionality; the welfare state, social policy and racialisation; citizenship and personal life; and racialised-gendered experience and black feminism in journals such as Race and Class, Signs, Cultural Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies; Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; Identities; European Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminist Theory and Feminist Review. 

She was Visiting Scholar at Clarke University, Massachusetts, USA and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Tavistock Clinic/Essex University. Her recent collaborations involve working with queer, black, of colour artists and curators working in London.