Lizzie Velásquez
Motivational speaker, author and anti-bullying activist from Austin, Texas.
Elizabeth Anne Velásquez
Lizzie Velásquez was born in Austin, Texas, on 13 March 1989, four weeks premature and weighing less than 2 pounds 11 ounces, the eldest of three children of Rita and Guadalupe Velásquez. She has an extremely rare congenital condition, Marfanoid–progeroid–lipodystrophy syndrome, which prevents her body from storing fat and gaining weight; she has never weighed more than 64 pounds, is blind in her right eye and eats many small meals a day. In 2015 researchers linked her condition to a mutation in the FBN1 gene.
At 17 she found herself labelled the "World's Ugliest Woman" in a video posted to YouTube, and turned the experience into a public campaign against bullying. Her TEDxAustinWomen talk "How Do YOU Define Yourself" (2014) and her YouTube channel have drawn tens of millions of views, and in 2015 she fronted Bystander Revolution's Month of Action for National Bullying Prevention Month.
She studied communication studies at Texas State University and has written several books, beginning with the bilingual autobiography Lizzie Beautiful: The Lizzie Velásquez Story (2010), co-authored with her mother, and the children's titles Be Beautiful, Be You (2012) and its successors.
How the name is written
Born and raised in Texas, she keeps the accented Latin American form Velásquez in her books and public work.
Sources
Facts in this profile are drawn from the Wikipedia article(s) linked below, consulted on 21 September 2026; the text is original. Wikipedia (English) · Wikipedia (Spanish)
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