Verene Albertha Shepherd (née Lazarus; born 1960) is a Jamaican academic who is a professor of social history at the University of the West Indies in Mona.

[2] Shepherd was born in Hopewell, Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica, one of the ten children of Ruthlyn and Alfred Lazarus.

[10] Shepherd has also held several positions within the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), serving as a member of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (WGEPAD) and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

She authored a letter, on "headed, official UN high commission for human rights paper"[12] to the Dutch government proposing that it move towards ending the tradition, and in a later interview with EenVandaag described the character as "a throwback to slavery".

[13] Her remark complicated and further polarized an ongoing national debate, accompanied by protests and social media campaigns, in particular as she was supposedly speaking on behalf of the UN when this was not actually the case.