Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, an activist, a mother and a composer. She is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. She is a cofounder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakhota health leaders, she advises the Mni Wichoni Health Circle, an Indigenous-led health sovereignty project at Standing Rock decolonizing food and wellness. She is the cofounder of the Deep Medicine Circle, a women of color-led, worker directed organization healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, restoration and learning. Through the Deep Medicine Circle, she leads the Farming is Medicine program, an innovative reparative food system example, which starts with moving land back to Indigenous hands and farming under their sovereignty, centering values of reciprocity, mutual benefit and reintegration into right relationship with one another and the web of life. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa & the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as "Liberation Music."
