The Very Long Bio

Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a political strategist, storyteller, and artist based in Los Angeles. She’s spent the majority of her life dancing at the intersection of activism and art as a South Asian Muslim 2nd-generation immigrant American woman.

An electoral organizer by trade, she’s mobilized over half a million Asian American & Pacific Islanders voters to the polls in over seventeen different languages in the past twenty years. In 2004, she founded South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), a national organization that organized South Asian American youth to have a political voice and get involved in the electoral process. She has since worked at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles and Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance employing in-language culturally competent tools to mobilize hundreds of thousands of AAPI voters to the polls. In her last role as Campaign Strategist at 18 Million Rising she innovated on digital first tactics that civically engaged the Asian American community at the intersections of culture shifting and counternarratives.  In Spring 2019, she was awarded UCLA’s Activist-in-Residence at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

With a Master in Public Policy degree with concentration on racial justice policy from UCLA's School of Public Affairs, she was part of a student led initiative to bring Critical Race Theory into public policy. While at UCLA, her thesis project entitled Barriers to Student Voting examined the various barriers that students in California face when exercising civic engagement. She was awarded UCLA Luskin School Alumni of the Year in 2017. An experienced integrated voter engagement trainer & coach, she has led workshops with Groundswell Fund, Georgia Muslim Voter Project, EnviroCitizen, APIA Vote, and Campus Camp Wellstone.

She was cohost of the five-year running #GoodMuslimBadMuslim Podcast that has been highly acclaimed by Oprah Magazine, NPR, Cosmopolitan and received an Activism Award from the City of Los Angeles. The podcast duo did a residency at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art Culture & Design in Honolulu, recorded live from De Young Museum, Aga Khan Museum, Manzanar, Yale University, Wharton School of Business and they even did a show from inside Obama’s White House.

A prolific storyteller in multiple mediums, in 2016, Taz was honored as a White House Champion of Change for Asian American and Pacific Islander Art and Storytelling. She had a monthly column called Radical Love, was a blogger for the largest South Asian American website Sepia Mutiny, and has written for outlets like Juggernaut, Truthout, The Aerogram, The Nation, and more. Her work is published in multiple anthologies, including Pretty Bitches (2020), Whiter (2020), Modern Loss (2018), Good Girls Marry Doctors (2016) and Love, Inshallah (2012). Her poetry is in the Los Angeles anthology Coiled Serpent (2016) and has her own chapbook called Emdash and Ellipses. She has just finished her first screenplay, The Merry Muslim Christmas Rom Com and is writing her next one.

Her artwork was featured in the exhibits Sharia Revoiced (2015), in Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s “H-1B” (2015), and Rebel Legacy: Activist Art from South Asian California (2014). Every Valentine’s Day for past decade, Taz annually sells sets of #MuslimVDay cards, a disruptive art project confusing the islamophobia narrative. A protest sign she co-designed for the 2017 Women’s March sits in the permanent Civil Rights archives of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

If You Need a Short Bio

Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a political strategist, storyteller, and artist based in Los Angeles. She creates at the intersection of counternarratives and culture-shifting as a South Asian American Muslim 2nd-gen woman. She’s turned out over 500,000 Asian American voters, recorded her #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast at the White House and makes #MuslimVDay cards annually. Her essays are published in the anthologies Pretty Bitches, Whiter, Good Girls Marry Doctors, Love Inshallah, and numerous online publications. In Spring 2019 she was UCLA’s Activist-in-Residence at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy and in 2016 received an award from President Obama’s White House as a Champion of Change in Art and Storytelling.