Early life
Birth date: October 18, 1991
Current role: mayor of New York City
Family: His mother is the acclaimed Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, and his father is Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University. In 2025 Zohran Mamdani married artist and illustrator Rama Duwaji.Quotation: “When we talk about my politics, I call myself a democrat[ic] socialist in many ways inspired by the words of Dr. King [Martin Luther King, Jr.] from decades ago, who said: ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.’ ”
Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. His mother, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair, and his father, anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, met in 1989 when she was doing research in Kampala for her second film (Mississippi Masala [1991], starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury). Both Nair and Mamdani had been born in India, but he had grown up in Uganda.
While Zohran Mamdani was a child, he and his family moved around to accommodate his father’s teaching positions. When he was seven, he moved with his family to New York City, and his father became an anthropology professor at Columbia University. “My father raised me with a real sense of being African, being proud of that heritage,” Mamdani later told New York magazine. His middle name is Kwame, after Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister.
For his elementary education, Mamdani attended Bank Street College of Education’s School for Children, a progressive private school in Manhattan. Later he enrolled at the Bronx High School of Science, where he cofounded a cricket team and ran unsuccessfully to be the school’s student vice president.
Becoming politically active
In 2010 Mamdani enrolled at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he cofounded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and organized a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. He graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies.
Mamdani has said that grappling with U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine was a formative political experience. “We say we care about freedom and justice and self-determination and yet for some reason we draw the line when it comes to Palestinians,” he said in a 2023 interview. “It became a driving force for me.”
Go beyond the basics with trusted, in-depth knowledge for professionals, students, and lifelong learners.
Mother and son at the moviesA 12-year-old Zohran Mamdani attends a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 with his mother, filmmaker Mira Nair.(more)
After college, Mamdani joined Change Corps, a yearlong training program for community organizers, but after six months he resigned, because he had been organizing a union within the program and believed that he was about to be fired. He worked on one of his mother’s films and formed a hip-hop duo with a childhood friend, going by the name Young Cardamom (later Mr. Cardamom). Ultimately, he found a job as a foreclosure prevention counselor in Queens.
Mayor of New York City Mr. MayorZohran Mamdani is sworn in as New York City’s mayor on January 1, 2026. Sen. Bernie Sanders administered the oath of office while Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji held the Qurʾān. Mamdani is the city’s first Muslim mayor.(more)
In October 2024 Mamdani announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City. From the outset, he made affordability his main campaign issue: “What I will bring to this race is an explicit and relentless focus to the number one issue of importance to New York City voters,” he told The Guardian in announcing his candidacy. “They can’t afford their rent. They can’t afford their childcare. They can’t afford transit. They can’t afford their groceries.” The policy priorities he ran on were freezing rents for tenants of rent-stabilized apartments, making public buses fast and fare-free, and launching a pilot program that would open a city-owned grocery store in each borough.
Though Mamdani had little name recognition at the outset of his campaign, he quickly became a factor in the race, thanks in large part to the campaign’s skillful use of videos on Instagram and TikTok. Those videos showed the charismatic Mamdani walking the 13-mile length of Manhattan, greeting residents, and participating in a polar plunge while wearing a business suit to show his commitment to freezing rents. Even as pundits raved about his style, polls showed him trailing the favorite, Cuomo.
During the campaign, Mamdani was often criticized for his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly the Israel-Hamas War. He has said that Israel has “a right to exist as a state with equal rights.” However, he has declined to condemn the slogan “Globalize the intifada.” Intifada, an Arabic word that means “rebellion” or “shaking off,” has been used to refer to two popular uprisings by Palestinians calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Mamdani has not used the slogan himself but has said that it speaks to “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He has pointed to intifada’s literal definition and noted that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used the term when translating exhibits about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis into Arabic. Moreover, he has spoken often about his commitment to combating antisemitism.
On June 24, 2025, Mamdani won the New York City Democratic primary, taking 56 percent of the final vote to Andrew Cuomo’s 44 percent. NPR called his victory an “astonishing upset” and suggested that it could be the start of a transformation in national politics—the beginning of “the Democrats’ Tea Party moment.” Mamdani drove tens of thousands of new voters to the polls; indeed, turnout in some neighborhoods doubled or tripled 2021 levels.
Mamdani again faced Cuomo, running as an Independent, as well as Republican Curtis Sliwa in the November 2025 general election that featured the highest voter turnout in a New York City mayoral election since 1969. He faced continued questions about his relative lack of experience and his qualifications to run the United States’ largest city. His progressive policy proposals won him the enthusiastic support of some of the Democratic Party’s most liberal standard-bearers, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York as well as independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Former vice president Kamala Harris and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul also endorsed Mamdani. But some high ranking New York Democrats, including — Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, and U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer—were slow to endorse Mamdani. Jeffries threw his support to Mamdani less than two weeks before Election Day. Schumer never endorsed Mamdani.
U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, who endorsed Cuomo in the waning days of the campaign, threatened to withhold federal funds from New York City if Mamdani were elected. He also raised the possibility of arresting Mamdani and stripping him of his American citizenship. (Mamdani became a citizen in 2018.) But the two men had what was characterized as a surprisingly cordial meeting at the White House in the weeks after the election. “I met with a man who … really wants to see New York be great again. I’ll really be cheering for him,” Trump said.
Upon taking office on January 1, 2026, Mamdani became New York City’s first Muslim mayor, its first Indian American mayor, and its youngest mayor since 30-year-old Hugh J. Grant was elected in 1889.
Quick Facts
Notable Family Members:
mother Mira Nair
(Show more)
Mamdani struck a decidedly progressive tone in his inaugural address, delivered after being sworn in by Sanders. Saying he would not “abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical,” Mamdani also stressed that he would be a mayor to those who opposed him as well as the more than one million New Yorkers who voted for him, saying near the beginning of his speech:
If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.