Zohran Mamdani

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. His paternal grandparents were born in present-day Tanzania, and his father's family was part of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa. The Mamdani family belongs to the Khoja Twelver community.

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 ... [and] 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 Manhattan's Morningside Heights neighborhood. He has called his upbringing "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 film crew members variously called him "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, Bronx, where he co-founded the school's first cricket team and unsuccessfully ran for student body vice president. …

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 (Abdul Bar Hussein), whose origins are in South Sudan, as Young Cardamom & HAB. Their first song, "Kanda [Chap Chap]", was about chapati, an Indian flatbread. They performed tracks from their 2016 EP Sidda Mukyaalo ("No going back to the village") 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 (UG) 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 the name Zohran Kwame. In the song, Mamdani expressed support for the Holy Land Five, five people connected to the Holy Land Foundation charity. 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.

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. …

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 was 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, saying, "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. Due to the campaign, Mamdani attended two thirds of the 2025 sessions in Albany, with perfect attendance until late April.

On October 23, 2024, Mamdani announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City. His platform included support for free city buses and a rent freeze in rent-stabilized housing. Mamdani also wanted the city government to operate five grocery stores—one in each borough—to drive down grocery prices. His platform included support for universal child care and the construction of 200,000 new affordable housing units. He also supported public safety reform and a $30 minimum wage by 2030. His platform called for tax increases on corporations and on those earning above $1 million annually.

For most of the primary campaign, Mamdani trailed former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in polling. He and Cuomo raised similar amounts of money, but his donor base was considerably larger than Cuomo's. A poll taken shortly before the June 24, 2025, primary election showed that Mamdani had caught up to Cuomo. First-choice results on election night showed Mamdani had a large lead over Cuomo, who conceded the race that evening. His polling margin was increased by ranked choice voting, particularly because he and third-favored candidate Brad Lander cross-endorsed each other by asking their voters to rank the other candidate second. Mamdani and Michael Blake also cross-endorsed each other a few days later. On June 16, The New York Times editorial board advised voters not to rank Mamdani while criticizing Cuomo.

On July 1, after the New York City Board of Elections released its ranked-choice ballot tabulation, the Associated Press announced Mamdani had won the primary. It was considered a major upset. Mamdani's campaign launch drew media attention for its use of Bollywood songs and cultural references, which aimed to engage younger and immigrant voters.

During the primary, Mamdani's campaign was supported by the New Yorkers for Lower Costs super PAC, which spent approximately $1.3 million supporting him and opposing Cuomo before the primary and raised an additional $1 million afterward. The super PAC received $100,000 in contributions from the Unity and Justice Fund in May and June 2025. …

Mamdani is a dual citizen of Uganda and the United States (naturalized in 2018). He follows the Twelver branch of Shia Islam. In 2021, Mamdani met animator and illustrator Rama Duwaji through Hinge, an online dating application. They became engaged in October 2024, held a private nikah ceremony two months later in Dubai, and were married in February 2025 in a civil ceremony at New York City Hall; they also had a ceremony in Uganda in July 2025. The couple resided in Mamdani's legislative district of Astoria, Queens, near Steinway Street, until they moved into Gracie Mansion.

Besides English, Mamdani can speak at least five other languages with varying degrees of proficiency: Hindi, Swahili, Luganda, Spanish, and Arabic. He is a fan of the English football team Arsenal and the New York Knicks basketball team, whose games he has attended as part of past campaigns, and also follows cricket and professional wrestling. He is a shareholder of the Spanish soccer team Real Oviedo, having been one of 20,000 people to purchase shares in the club in 2012 as part of a fundraising drive to stave off bankruptcy. His favorite anime series is Digimon.