Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a Data & Society advisor, is a Dalit American artist, community organizer, technologist, and theorist. The author of The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, she is the executive director and cofounder of Equality Labs, the largest Dalit civil rights organization working to empower caste-oppressed people in the US and globally. Through her work at Equality Labs, Soundararajan has mobilized South Asian Americans toward dismantling eons-long systems of oppression, with the goal of ending caste apartheid, gender-based violence, white supremacy, and religious intolerance. She previously co-founded Third World Majority, an international media training organization and collective that supported people from disenfranchised groups in telling their own stories, in their own way.

Her intersectional, cross-pollinating work — research, education, art, activism, and digital security — helps to create a more generous, global, expansive, and inclusive definition of South Asian identity, along with safe spaces from which to honor the stories of these communities. Her work has been recognized by the US Congress, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the Producers Guild of America diversity program, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sorbonne, The Source, The Utne Reader, The National Center for the Humanities, The National Science Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Soundararajan was an inaugural fellow of the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship and the Atlantic Foundation for Racial Equity, and is a current fellow at the Stanford Center for South Asian Studies.