Apsara Iyer
Apsara Iyer is an American art crime investigator and the 137th president of the Harvard Law Review. She is the first Indian American woman to be elected to that position.
Early life and education
Iyer was born in Chicago and raised in West Lafayette, Indiana. She attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then Yale University, where she received a bachelor's in Spanish and in economics and math. In 2012, she was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship. She was awarded the Clarendon Fund scholarship to pursue graduate studies at University of Oxford, where she received an MPhil in economics.Career
Work to counter antiquities trafficking and art crime
In 2018, Iyer joined the Antiquities Trafficking Unit within the New York County District Attorney's office, working with Matthew Bogdanos on major cases related to art crime, the illicit antiquities trade, and looted art. She has been instrumental in the return of numerous looted, stolen, and trafficked cultural objects to their countries of origin. She has been involved in the repatriation of cultural property to 15 different countries, amounting to the return of over 1,100 stolen cultural objects.In 2021, Iyer spent a summer working with Donna Yates at Maastricht University, researching the application of statutes of limitations in cultural property cases as a Chayes International Public Service Fellow.
Prior to this, she was a volunteer researcher in the Trafficking Culture research consortium and at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Cultural Heritage Center.