Rupa Marya

Rupa Marya is a professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco and is working on a book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, with Raj Patel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Allen Lane 2021). Marya and Patel argue that society is “in the grip of a global epidemic of inflammation” with symptoms ranging from new allergies and cancers, through fascism to year-round forest fires and insect extinction. Inflamed is described as a “radical new analysis of health and disease,” an investigation into how people’s health is connected to political, social, economical and ecological systems and how wellbeing requires structural transformation.

Marya is helping to establish the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic and Farm to decolonizine food and medicine in partnership with Lakota health leaders at Standing Rock, raising over $1 million for the effort, including a grant from Colin Kaepernick to support the efforts. She is a co-investigator in The Justice Study, examining the health impacts of police violence. Marya is the bandleader for Rupa & the April Fishes, a global alternative band that makes music about social justice and the environment. One of her greatest achievements is liberating Happy Birthday from Warner Chapelle who falsely claimed to own the rights. She believes if we can liberate the commons, starting with a song, we can put ourselves on track for greater health.

On the Front Lines in 2020

Rupa was quoted in two April San Francisco Chronicle articles about the dangers of coronavirus in the homeless population (April 10 and April 29). In 2020, she worked with Poor Magazine in East Oakland who are getting food, masks, sanitation supplies out to unhoused and marginally housed people in East Oakland during the fires and COVID. She also organized health workers in the Do No Harm Coalition, which she co-founded, to keep people protesting against police violence safe during the challenging times of 2020. The Do No Harm Coalition (DNHC) is dedicated to addressing social ills including police violence, immigrant health, homelessness, disability rights and medical abuse as a means to achieving greater public health. It started with 10 health workers and now is more than 1900 members with requests for 40 new chapters to be set up across the country.

In June of this year Rupa served on a panel in a webinar presented by the American Medical Association on police brutality and COVID-19, and she was quoted in a CNN video and article about racism. You can also watch an inspiring 2018 keynote address she gave on health and justice at Bioneers.

Rupa is also director, composer and front-woman for her band, Rupa and the April Fishes. They create a “powerfully evocative” (Los Angeles Times) sound that pulsates with the pluralism of United States culture, celebrating the art of resistance through a wide musical palette that pulls from over a decade of playing street parties, festivals and symphonic concerts through 29 countries with songs in 5 languages. Their latest album, Growing Upward (2019), available digitally and with seed packets, has been called “a firecracker of a record” touching on issues of climate justice and belonging with lyrics that are “pure poetry” (Songlines Magazine).​

In 2020, UCSF’s Edison T. Uno Public Service Award was awarded to Rupa for her work uplifting social justice and health in an impressive assortment of endeavors.