Veena Hampapur

Veena is our New Media Narrative Strategist and leads our storytelling podcast, Re:Work. Previously, she was Director of Communications at the UCLA Labor Center. Dedicated to storytelling for social change, she discovered her passion for narrative change and public education while working at various nonprofits including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in California and Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM) in New York, where she focused on issues related to homelessness, immigration, policing, and youth.

Veena is a filmmaker and 2012 Visual Communications Armed with a Camera Fellow; her films include advocacy and education films for community organizations as well as documentaries that have been showcased in film festivals, classrooms, and by the Smithsonian. Veena also created Memos from Motherhood, a podcast that unpacks the personal and political nuances of stepping into parenthood during a global pandemic through an anthropological lens. She was an AIR New Voices Fellow in 2022.

Veena earned her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from UCLA. Her research focused on working class South Asian immigrants and their children, and examined how race, immigration, education, and surveillance shape one another in post-9/11 America.