Zohran Mamdani
Zohran Kwame Mamdani is an American politician who has served since 2026 as the 112th mayor of New York City. A member of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani served from 2021 to 2025 as a member of the New York State Assembly for the 36th district, representing Astoria, Queens.
Mamdani was born in Kampala to Indian parents, academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair. When he was seven years old, after having spent three years in Cape Town, he and his family moved to New York City. Mamdani graduated from the Bronx High School of Science before receiving a bachelor's degree with a major in Africana studies from Bowdoin College in 2014.
After working as a housing counselor and a musician, Mamdani entered New York City politics as a campaign manager for Khader El-Yateem and Ross Barkan. He was first elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020, defeating five-term incumbent Aravella Simotas in the Democratic primary. Representing Astoria and Long Island City, he was reelected without opposition in 2022 and 2024.
In October 2024, Mamdani announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City in the 2025 election. A democratic socialist, Mamdani campaigned on a progressive, affordability-focused platform, supporting fare-free city buses, universal child care, city-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze on rent-stabilized units, additional affordable housing units, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030. He also expressed support for LGBTQ rights, comprehensive public safety reform, and tax increases on corporations and those earning above $1million annually. He won the Democratic primary in June 2025, defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo in an upset, and was elected mayor in the November general election. He is New York City's first Muslim and Asian American mayor.
Early life and education
Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born on October 18, 1991, in Kampala, Uganda, the only child of postcolonialist academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair. He was given his middle name, Kwame, by his father in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Both his parents are of Indian descent. His father is a Gujarati Muslim who was born in Mumbai and raised in Uganda. His mother is a Punjabi Hindu who was born in Rourkela and raised in Bhubaneswar. His paternal grandparents were born in present-day Tanzania, and his father's family was part of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa. His maternal grandfather, Amrit Lal Nair, was a former Indian Administrative Service officer, and his maternal grandmother, Praveen Nair, was a social worker and founder of the Salaam Baalak Trust in India.Mamdani lived in Kampala until the age of five, when his family moved to Cape Town, South Africa, after his father was appointed head of African studies at the University of Cape Town. He attended St. George's Grammar School in Mowbray from 1996 to 1998, during the early post-apartheid years. He later said that the experience of living in Cape Town "taught me what inequality looks like up close... that justice has to be more than an idea; it has to be material".
The family moved to the United States and settled in New York City when Mamdani was seven, and he was raised in Morningside Heights. He has described his upbringing as "privileged", saying, "I never had to want for something, and yet I knew that was not in any way the reality for most New Yorkers." As a child, he was often present on his mother's film sets, where he was loved by members of the film crews, who variously referred to him as "Z", "Zoru", "Fadoose", and "Nonstop Mamdani".
Mamdani attended the Bank Street School for Children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he successfully ran as the independent candidate in a middle school mock election, adopting a platform of "equal rights, anti-war policies that proposed spending money on education rather than the military". In 2003, he returned to Kampala for a year and attended school during his father's sabbatical there; his paternal grandparents and aunt still lived there and helped take care of him while his father was working on the book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
In 2010, Mamdani graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in Kingsbridge Heights, where he co-founded the school's first cricket team and unsuccessfully ran for student body vice president. He also played soccer with the West Side Soccer League.
Mamdani attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he co-founded the school's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. He was a regular contributor to the campus newspaper The Bowdoin Orient, covering politics, culture, and sports in his column, "Kwame's Column". In January 2014, he co-authored an op-ed in the Bangor Daily News urging Bowdoin to join the American Studies Association's boycott of Israel and criticizing the college's president, Barry Mills. Mamdani graduated from Bowdoin in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in Africana studies.
Early career
2015–2019: Hip-hop and rap
Mamdani is a fan of hip-hop and has composed, performed, and produced rap music. Under the moniker Young Cardamom, he collaborated with his best friend, Ugandan rapper HAB, whose origins are in South Sudan, as Young Cardamom & HAB. Their first song, "Kanda ", was about chapati, an Indian flatbread. They performed tracks from their 2016 EP Sidda Mukyaalo at the Nyege Nyege festival. The pair rapped in languages including Nubi, Luganda, Swahili, and English, partly to create a unique Ugandan style of rap rather than imitating American rap, and partly to convey that Ugandan residents with roots in other countries are all Ugandan. The chapati was chosen as a symbol because it originates in the Indian subcontinent but has become a Ugandan staple. In their music, they addressed social issues in Uganda, such as corruption and "black and brown relations", as well as colonialism. Young Cardamom & HAB were nominated for "Rookie of the Year" at the inaugural Ugandan Hip Hop Awards.Mamdani curated and produced the soundtrack for his mother Mira Nair's 2016 film Queen of Katwe, for which he was nominated for a 2017 Guild of Music Supervisors Awards; he co-wrote the song "#1 Spice" with HAB for the film. Mamdani also appears as an extra in the film, and is credited as third assistant director. Nair subsequently offered him parts in the stage musical adaptation of her film Monsoon Wedding, after he took part in stage readings for the show, and her television adaptation of the Vikram Seth novel A Suitable Boy, but he declined.
In 2017, Mamdani released the song "Salaam" under his middle name, Zohran Kwame. In April 2019, under the moniker Mr. Cardamom, he released the single "Nani", an homage to his grandmother. Actress and food writer Madhur Jaffrey portrays Mamdani's grandmother in the video, which pays tribute to Jaffrey and New York's South Asian culture.
2015–2019: Political involvement
Mamdani entered New York City politics as a volunteer for Ali Najmi's campaign in the 2015 special election for the 23rd district of the City Council. Mamdani was inspired to join Najmi's campaign after learning that he was supported by Heems, a New York rapper of Indian descent and co-founder of alternative hip-hop group Das Racist. Specifically, Mamdani attributes his involvement in local politics to a 2015 The Village Voice article about Najmi and Heems, whom he described as one of his favorite rappers.In 2017, Mamdani joined the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and worked for the campaign of New York City Council candidate Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian Lutheran minister and democratic socialist from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Part of Mamdani's motivation for joining the DSA was its pro-Palestine stance, which aligned with his own prior activism. Mamdani served as the campaign manager for Ross Barkan's 2018 unsuccessful bid for the New York State Senate and was also a field organizer for fellow democratic socialist Tiffany Cabán's close-run but also unsuccessful 2019 campaign for Queens County district attorney.
Starting in 2018, Mamdani worked as a foreclosure prevention and housing counselor. There, he assisted lower-income immigrant homeowners in Queens with eviction notices and efforts to prevent them from being evicted from their homes. He said the experience motivated him to run for office to address the housing and affordability crisis.
2020–2025: New York State Assembly
In October 2019, Mamdani announced his campaign to represent New York's 36th State Assembly district, which encompasses Astoria and Long Island City in Queens. He was endorsed by the DSA, running on a platform of housing reform, police and prison reform, and public ownership of utilities. Mamdani's June 2020 primary victory over five-term Democratic incumbent Aravella Simotas took almost a month to call, and he won the general election with no Republican opposition in November. Mamdani was reelected without opposition in 2022 and 2024.Mamdani is a member of the DSA's nine-member "State Socialists in Office" bloc in New York and a member of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. He was the keynote speaker at the 2023 DSA convention, and said, "We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special because of our organization".
By January 2025, Mamdani was a member of nine Assembly committees: the Committee on Aging; the Committee on Cities; the Committee on Election Law; the Committee on Energy; the Committee on Real Property Taxation; the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic & Asian Legislative Caucus; the Puerto Rican/Hispanic Task Force; the Asian Pacific American Task Force; and the Task Force on New Americans.
By May 2025, Mamdani had been the primary sponsor of 20 bills in the Assembly—three of which became law—and the co-sponsor of 238 bills. As a member of the Assembly, he helped launch a successful fare-free bus pilot program and participated in a hunger strike alongside taxi drivers.