Kavitha Rajagopalan is director of the Asian Media Initiative at the Center for Community Media. In this role, she develops programming, research, community spaces, and peer-to-peer networks to sustain and support media for and by Asian American and Pacific Islander communities across the U.S.
Previously, she served as CCM’s community engagement manager, where she produced the center’s biweekly newsletter, managed its social media, engaged with regional and other strategic partner organizations, and created community spaces for community media journalists. The Asian Media Initiative builds on her work in that role to highlight and amplify the national Asian media sector, from convening public conversations to publishing a groundbreaking report, Asian Media on the Front Lines.
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.
She holds a Master in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a B.A. from the College of William & Mary. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in political science.