b. Johannesburg, South Africa
Based between New Haven, USA and Johannesburg, South Africa

Zahra Abba Omar is a researcher and writer. She is presently a PhD candidate in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Yale University. For 2026, she will be part of the Yale ISPS Graduate Policy Fellows Program. At Yale, she also co-convenes the reading group Gender Work, which is supported by the Whitney Humanities Center, and Yale’s Ethnography Hub. She received her BA Honours in Sociology, with distinction, at the University of Cape Town in 2020, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Prior to her graduate study, she served as the inaugural Tech Rights Fellow at ALT Advisory, assisting with research and analysis. The Johannesburg-based public interest advisory and law firm works at the intersection of technology and justice. Previously, she served as a research assistant for the Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents (Accelerate) Hub, co-located at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford, which sought to map paths for accelerators in the implementation of the United Nations’s 2030 development agenda.

School assembly, 2005 (by my mum)