Storytelling + Advocacy = Social Change

Valarie Kaur is an award-winning filmmaker, civil rights advocate, and interfaith leader who centers her work around the power of storytelling. She is the founding director of Groundswell at Auburn Seminary, a non-profit initiative with 80,000 members that mobilizes people of faith for social change. She has led national campaigns responding to hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, and solitary confinement. She is a frequent political contributor on MSNBC, and her essays appear regularly on CNN, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post. Kaur earned degrees from Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School, where she founded the Yale Visual Law Project to train students in the art of storytelling for social change. The Center for American Progress lists Kaur among 13 national faith leaders to watch in 2013. A third-generation Sikh American, Kaur is from Clovis, California where her family settled as Punjabi farmers in 1913. She lives in Los Angeles with her filmmaking partner and husband Sharat Raju.