Khin Mai Aung

Khin Mai Aung has practiced American civil rights, immigrant rights, and education law for over 15 years, including most recently at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and currently works in civil rights policy and enforcement for New York State. She moved to New York City from San Francisco to battle anti-Muslim profiling and discrimination in the city's public schools after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and has done significant work with Southeast Asian refugees (including from Myanmar) across the United States.

She has written about Myanmar's Rohingya genocide in the Huffington Post and the Buddhist blog Lion's Roar, and it is her goal to promote a balanced and fair narrative based on fact and reason about that crisis, as well as about civil rights and ethnic justice in Myanmar more broadly. In addition to the Huffington Post, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Hyphen, and other outlets. She is also the United States Coordinator for the Free Rohingya Coalition, which advocates against Myanmar's persecution of its Rohingya minority and engages Rohingya survivors to play an active role in building a viable future. Among other things with the Coalition, she has advised the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh on a report documenting Rohingya victims' accounts of persecution and participated in meetings with policymakers and nonprofit leaders in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She is also a Coordinator of Doa-A-Yae: Coalition for Civil Rights in Burma, a coalition of civil society organizations, activists, researchers and scholars from Myanmar and the Burmese diaspora. 

Ms. Aung was born in Yangon, Myanmar, and is a Buddhist of Bamar and Rakhine descent. She left Myanmar as a child, immigrated to the United States via Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and grew up primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law where she was an editor at both the California Law Review and Asian Law Journal, and received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.