Anika Nawar Ullah

Anika Nawar Ullah is a third-year medical student in the UCLA-Drew Medical Education Program, transdisciplinary artist (M.S Media Arts + Technology, MIT Media Lab), National Geographic Society documentary filmmaker, and cross-cultural researcher whose career has been situated at the nexus of culturally-rooted health advocacy, ecological justice, and participatory art-making in the U.S and internationally, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. As an aspiring integrative psychiatrist, she is passionate about unearthing cross-cultural + decolonial collective healing practices and cultivating these modalities of care to advance mental health and wellbeing in Indigenous, migrant, refugee, rural, unhoused, and other underserved/ displaced/marginalized communities. These efforts began with establishing a nonprofit initiative, Intersectional Health Project San Diego, in 2016, which was recognized by the U.S Congress, UC President Janet Napolitano, and others for contributions to public health and and its focus on working with immigrant, refugee, and low income communities in the U.S-Mexico border region to co-produce knowledge and media narratives regarding overshadowed environmental and public health issues. In 2018, Anika then received a Fulbright-National Geographic Research + Storytelling Fellowship to partner with the Taiwanese Ministry of Health and Indigenous Peoples Council to explore the cultural dimensions of betel nut-linked oral cancer incidence through scientific research, participatory documentary filmmaking, anthropology, and health policy. She then pursued her master’s degree in Media Arts + Technology at the MIT School of Architecture’s Media Lab in 2019, where she worked with Dr. Kevin Esvelt’s Sculpting Evolution Group and Indigenous Maori communities in New Zealand to explore how participatory storytelling, design, and policy can enable new models for culturally-informed gene editing biotechnology co development to improve human and ecological health. Anika then began her medical training at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine in 2021 as a part of the CDU trainee cohort focused on health equity. In medical school, Anika has served as the Director of Advocacy for the LA Human Rights Initiative, spearheading a storytelling and policy advocacy project to expand the rights of U.S asylum seekers to include climate refugees, and has been working on an arts-based research project titled “Solastalgia,” which explores the landscape of climate change and mental health inequity locally and globally through cross-cultural research and participatory documentary-fiction filmmaking.