Rabia Chaudry

Rabia Chaudry is an attorney, advocate, and author of the New York Times bestselling book Adnan’s Story and her critically acclaimed second book, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir Of Food, Fat, And Family.  Rabia is the Executive Producer of the HBO documentary series “The Case Against Adnan Syed” and also co-producer and host of the podcasts Undisclosed, Rabia and Ellyn Solve the Case, Nighty Night, The Hidden Djinn, and The 45th.

With over 400 million downloads, Undisclosed is the most popular and impactful wrongful conviction podcast in the world. The Undisclosed team has helped exonerate over a dozen defendants and find new evidence to get nearly all of their defendants back in court.

Rabia is a 2021 Aspen Institute/ADL Civil Society Fellow and was previously a 2016 Aspen Ideas Scholar and on the Vanguard Board at the Aspen Institute. She is a Fellow of the Truman National Security Project, a Fellow of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, a Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and a former Board member of the ACLU of Connecticut and Maryland. Rabia is the recipient of the Truman National Security Project’s 2015 Harry S. Truman Award for Communications & Media Influence, is a 2015 Carnegie Corporation Great Immigrant, and is the recipient of the 2015 Healing & Hope award by the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. She is currently a founding board member of the Inter-Jewish Muslim Alliance, and the Muslim Jewish Advisory Council, both of which focus on building Muslim-Jewish coalitions around pressing policy issues, and educating across communities to break barriers.

In 2016 Rabia was named a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at U.S. Institute of Peace, where she researched the intersection of religion and violent extremism in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. During this time Rabia also worked with PYCA, Pakistan Youth Change Advocates, delivering leadership trainings in Islamabad to rising youth advocates from across Pakistan.

Rabia came to USIP from the New America Foundation, where she was an International Security Fellow, developing and leading a CVE (countering violent extremism) community project in partnership with Google, Facebook and Twitter. Her work New America focused on the empowerment of American Muslim communities in social media advocacy.

In 2011 Rabia founded the Safe Nation Collaborative, a CVE training firm, which worked on two fronts: providing CVE and cultural competency training to law enforcement, correctional, and homeland security officials, and providing national security and CVE training to Muslim communities and institutions. During its existence, Safe Nation worked with the US Department of Homeland Security, US Department of Justice, the National Counter Terror Center, the Maryland State Police and Correctional Officer Training Commission, and the DC Metro Police Department. As a senior CVE analyst and consultant, Rabia worked on both domestic and international CVE projects with government and nonprofit sectors.

Rabia received her Juris Doctorate from the George Mason School of Law and practiced immigration and civil rights law for over a decade before moving into the CVE policy sphere. Her practice focus was asylum and family immigration, and civil rights defense of Muslim immigrants against federal law enforcement agencies.

Rabia is a frequent public speaker and writer on criminal justice, civil rights, and media advocacy through storytelling.