Andrea Morrell is Professor of Anthropology at Guttman Community College, where she has taught since the school opened in 2012. Her research and teaching focuses on race and racism, prisons, policing, and labor.  Her book, Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York, an abolitionist ethnography of a town with two prisons in central New York State, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2025. Her work has also been published in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Transforming Anthropology, and Truthout.

Professor Morrell is the recipient of the 2023 Paul Naish Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Scholarship for the 2025–2026 academic year. She has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center, PSC – CUNY, the CUNY Office of Research, and the CUNY Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI). Professor Morrell is a proud member of the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY AFT Local #2334 and served as the Vice Chair and Grievance Counselor of the Guttman Chapter of the PSC for her first ten years at Guttman CC. 

Professor Morrell teaches First Year Experience courses on social justice and courses on race and racism, sexuality and gender, critical approaches to crime, and a newly designed course on science fiction and social theory. She sees teaching community college students as her most important political work, grounded in a commitment to open admissions.