Deepa Iyer

Deepa is a South Asian American writer, lawyer, strategist, facilitator, and activist. She is a Senior Advisor at Building Movement Project and director of Solidarity Is, a project that provides trainings, narratives, and resources on building deep and lasting multiracial solidarity.

She served as executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) for a decade and has held positions at Race Forward, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, and the Asian American Justice Center.

Deepa’s first book, We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future (The New Press 2015), received a 2016 American Book Award. She hosts a podcast called Solidarity Is This to explore solidarity practices. She has received fellowships from Open Society Foundations and the Social Change Initiative, and in 2019, she received an honorary doctoral degree from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Deepa serves on the Advisory Council of the Emergent Fund.

An immigrant who moved to Kentucky from India when she was twelve, she graduated from the University of Notre Dame Law School and Vanderbilt University.

The SCI Fellowship allowed Deepa to deepen relations between and reflect on how best to support more effective social change practices in the United States and Europe.