Valarie Kaur is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, a leading Sikh American voice, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project.

When a family friend was the first person killed in a hate crime after September 11, 2001, she began to document hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans, which resulted in the award-winning film Divided We Fall. Since then, she has made films and led story-based campaigns on hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, solitary confinement, marriage equality, and Internet freedom. She is the founder of Auburn’s Groundswell Movement; the Yale Visual Law Project, where she trained law students how to make films for social change; and co-founded Faithful Internet to build the movement for net neutrality.

During her work, whether inside supermax prisons, on the military base at Guantanamo, or at sites of mass shootings, she identified a surprising key element for social change: the ethic of love. Today she leads the Revolutionary Love Project to champion love as a force for justice and wellspring for social action.