Geraldine Anne Ferraro (1935–2011) was the first woman nominated for vice president by a major U.S. political party and the first Italian American to run on a national ticket. Ferraro came to the campaign with over two decades of experience in law and politics.

Ferraro was born in Newburgh, NY in 1935, and at age 10 moved to the Bronx after the death of her father. She attended Marymount Academy and went on to graduate from Marymount Manhattan College in 1956. Early in her career, Ferraro worked as an elementary school teacher in Astoria, Queens while attending night classes at Fordham University School of Law until her graduation with honors in 1960. In the same year, she married her husband John Zaccaro, a Forest Hills real estate broker. The couple lived at 22 Deepdene Rd, just a few blocks from the co-named street, from 1967 to 2002.

Ferraro worked part-time as a lawyer while raising her children, Donna, John and Laura, in Forest Hills. From 1974-1978, Ferraro worked at the Queens District Attorney office, first with an assistant district attorney position offered by her cousin, District Attorney Nicholas Ferraro, and then with the Special Victims Bureau, a position which shifted her toward a slightly more liberal perspective.

Ferraro decided to run for the Queens seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which opened the same year she left the D.A. office. The attorney won the Democratic nomination and the election, serving New York's 9th District as the first congresswoman from Queens from 1979 until 1985. Over the course of her campaign and tenure as a U.S. representative, Ferraro platformed liberal policies such as robust elderly support and reproductive rights, as well as supporting some conservative legislation related to school desegregation, school prayer and tuition tax credits. These political choices gained the representative favor within the Democratic party, because the platform as a whole appealed to a diverse audience, and paved Ferraro's path to Vice Presidential nomination.

In the 1984 presidential election, Ferraro served as Walter Mondale’s Democratic running mate. When they lost the election, Ferraro returned to practicing law and eventually worked in public office again when appointed by President Bill Clinton to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 1993.

In 2011, after a 12 year battle with multiple myeloma (a form of blood cancer), Ferraro passed away in Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital at the age of 75. Forest Hills community members, family, friends and city officials came together the following year to commemorate Ferraro at the unveiling of "Geraldine Ferraro Way."