Maya Harris

Maya Harris

Maya Lakshmi Harris is an American lawyer, public policy advocate, and writer. She was appointed as one of three senior policy advisors to lead the policy agenda for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer researcher who emigrated from Chennai, India in 1960. She gave birth to her only child, Meena Harris, whose biological father is white.

About Maya Harris in brief

Summary Maya HarrisMaya Lakshmi Harris is an American lawyer, public policy advocate, and writer. She was appointed as one of three senior policy advisors to lead the policy agenda for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Harris was formerly a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. From 2008 until 2013, Harris was Vice President for Democracy, Rights and Justice at the Ford Foundation. She served as the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the largest ACLU affiliate in the country. She is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer researcher who emigrated from Chennai, India in 1960.

Her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopala, was a career civil servant with federal Government of India. She and her older sister, Kamala, were raised with beliefs from Baptist and Hindu faiths. She gave birth to her only child, Meena Harris, whose biological father is white. Harris served as campaign chairwoman for her sister Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign for president until the campaign’s suspension. She has been called ‘the next Bobby Kennedy’ and ‘the future of the Democratic Party’ She is also a contributing author to The Nation and The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Pushes Back from the Back of the Nation, publishing the essay “The Civil Rights Gap’.