Kavitha Rajagopalan is Director of Research and Analytics at the Center for Community Media, where she oversees the design and production of research to map, build insight, and develop thought leadership to illuminate and strengthen the national ecosystem of community-based and in-language local journalism for Black, Indigenous, Latino, AAPI, LGBTQ+, immigrant, and other communities underserved in traditional journalism.
Between 2022 and 2025, she founded and led the Center’s Asian Media Initiative, producing a national map and directory of more than 730 outlets serving Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, along with the report AAPI News Media: Origins and Futures, as well as a range of high-impact programming in collaboration with the Center’s Black and Latino Media Initiatives. AMI was recognized in 2024 with a Community Impact Award from AAJA. She also served as CCM’s community engagement manager from 2020 to 2022, leading the community’s public communications, managing strategic partnerships, and establishing peer-to-peer resource exchange and support networks for community media journalists.
Kavitha is an author and expert on global migration and urban immigrant communities. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Atlantic’s CityLab, as well as various academic journals and policy magazines. She has also offered expert commentary on MSNBC and as an op-ed columnist for The Observer, PBS Online, and Newsday.
She is the author of Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West (Rutgers University Press) and co-author of The Testing and Learning Revolution: The Future of Assessment in Education (Palgrave Macmillan). She is a contributing author in Borders and Mobility in South Asia, part of the University of Amsterdam Press’s award-winning series on global migration. Previously, she was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, specializing in citizenship, undocumentedness, and urban immigrant communities.