Aparna Mukherjee

  • Catalyst Lead
  • Asian American Journalists Association

Aparna is a consultant, serving as AAJA’s lead for the Catalyst media entrepreneurship program for founders of color; and as a Digimentor, working to empower nonprofits, startups, and media organizations to better discover and share their communities’ stories with a clear equity lens. As a 2021 John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford University, she focused on boosting democratic voice in public meetings through AI, sentiment analysis, and deliberative democracy methodologies. Through Sense LA, a systems thinking creative assembly series she co-created and launched out of LA’s City Hall, where she served as an Executive Adviser, she also emphasizes the role of emotion and lived experience in shaping public opinion and policy. A former journalist, Aparna has worked in newsrooms at the AP, Bloomberg News, CNBC, and written for WSJ and The New Yorker. At The New York Times, she ran the paper’s online education ventures group and civic engagement initiatives. Her other innovation-focused roles include serving as McKinsey’s first social media editor and running industry programs for the Paley Center for Media. An alumna of Bryn Mawr College, she holds a joint Master’s in Journalism/MBA from Columbia, where she was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow and taught digital strategy master classes for EMBAs.