Jenny Durkan

The family lived on Mercer Island in the mid-1950s and Bellevue in the early 1960s, before settling in rural Issaquah during a time "when there [wasn't] any development."

Her father, Martin Durkan, was a prominent Seattle-area lawyer, Democratic legislator, and lobbyist whose career included 16 years in the state Senate and two unsuccessful runs for governor.

Her mother was primarily a homemaker who supported her husband's career, though she eventually became an executive editor of the Ballard News-Tribune and wrote editorials.

Durkan attended Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a private Catholic girls' school in Washington State.

She spent part of her junior year of high school as an exchange student in London and said that "the best part of the experience was traveling through England to Scotland, France, Austria, Switzerland and Germany."

A high-school classmate of Durkan's remembers her as "super independent, and rough-and-tumble…strong-willed and adventurous."

Jenny Anne Durkan (born May 19, 1958) is an American attorney, former federal prosecutor, and politician who served as the 56th mayor of Seattle, Washington.

She is the daughter of Martin Durkan.

Durkan is a member of the Democratic Party.

Jenny Durkan was born in Seattle on May 19, 1958.

She was raised in a large Irish Catholic family of eight siblings.

Lowry had been a campaign manager to and protege of her father in 1972, and Durkan worked for then congressman Lowry in the 1980s.

Durkan earned her B.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1980.

At Notre Dame, she tried out for the basketball team before being cut and ending up as the team's statistician.

After graduating, Durkan spent two years in Alaska, teaching high-school English and coaching a girls' basketball team in the Yup’ik Eskimo community through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

After earning her Juris Doctor from University of Washington School of Law in 1985, Durkan began practicing law as a criminal defense lawyer and civil litigator.

After a summer working as a baggage handler for Wien Air Alaska in St. Mary's, Alaska as a dues-paying Teamster, Durkan enrolled in the University of Washington School of Law, earning her J.D. degree in 1985.

In 1991, Durkan returned to Seattle to join the law firm of Schroeter Goldmark & Bender, and she established a successful practice focusing on criminal defense and work on behalf of plaintiffs, including the family of Lt. Walter Kilgore, who died in the Pang warehouse fire, the case of Stan Stevenson (a retired firefighter who was stabbed leaving a Mariners game) and the case of Kate Fleming, who died in a flash flood in her Madison Valley basement during the Hanukkah Eve windstorm of 2006.

"I wanted to be a lawyer since I was 5 years old," she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1992.

"When I graduated from law school, my mother said, 'Finally someone is going to pay you to argue."'

While in law school, Durkan participated in a pilot criminal defense clinic, working with the public defender's office to represent individuals charged in Seattle municipal court.

She continued the work on a pro bono basis, until she moved to Washington, D.C. to practice law with the firm of Williams & Connolly.

Durkan served on the Washington State Sentencing Guidelines Commission from 1993 to 1996.

In 1994 Durkan became executive council and political director to Governor Mike Lowry, making her Lowry's chief lawyer.

After initially recommending that an independent investigator represent Lowry, Durkan resigned in February 1995 after deputy press secretary Susanne Albright accused him of sexual harassment.

She served as the first Citizen Observer on the Seattle Police Firearms Review Board from 1997 to 2000 and two Seattle mayors asked her to serve on Citizen Review Committees for the Seattle Police Department.

Among Durkan's most prominent cases in private practice was the 2005 recount lawsuit that attempted to undo Governor Chris Gregoire's election in 2004.

The Democratic Party turned to Durkan with Gregoire's election "facing an unprecedented trial and Republicans trying to remove her from office."

Gregoire's victory was upheld.

In October 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington.

She held that position until September 2014.

Durkan was elected the 56th mayor of Seattle in 2017, becoming the city's first female mayor since the 1920s and its second openly LGBT elected mayor.

She took first place in the nonpartisan August primary and defeated urban planner and political activist Cary Moon in the November general election.

She and her partner, Dana Garvey, have two sons.

Durkan was criticized for her response to the George Floyd protests in Seattle and her handling of protesters and law enforcement in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

In January 2017, Durkan worked with families and other attorneys at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to obtain a federal court order, the day President Donald Trump's first travel ban executive order went into effect, blocking the deportation of people who had arrived at the airport from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

After serving as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, Durkan joined Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to head a new Seattle law office specializing in internet and online security issues.

At Quinn Emanuel, she also represented FIFA as one of the lawyers conducting an independent internal investigation of issues related to a global corruption case brought by Swiss authorities and the U.S. Justice Department.

The investigation and related actions by FIFA's Ethics Committee led to the ousting of longtime FIFA President Sepp Blatter and his key deputy Jerome Valcke, as well as a restructuring of the FIFA Executive Committee and World Cup processes.

In December 2020, she announced that she would not seek reelection after the end of her mayoral term.