Zaheer Ali

Oral Historian & Educator

Zaheer Ali is an educator and oral historian with more than two decades of experience directing nationally recognized public history and cultural heritage initiatives. His work lies at the intersection of oral history, historic preservation, and narrative change, utilizing multiple media formats and platforms including websites, podcasts, social media, live streams, interactive audio, film, archival curation, exhibitions, and public programming.

He is currently the inaugural executive director of the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice at The Lawrenceville School, an innovative education initiative supporting social justice teaching and practice through scholarship, programming, and experiential learning. In addition, he is an executive producer of American Muslims: A History Revealed, a digital film series and feature-length broadcast documentary currently in production.

In 2020, he was Senior Fellow of the Pillars Fund Muslim Narrative Change Cohort and a recipient of the Open Society Foundation’s Soros Equality Fellowship for his work on leveraging the power of storytelling and listening for social change. Previously, as oral historian at Brooklyn Historical Society (now the Center for Brooklyn History), he directed the Muslims in Brooklyn documentary history and arts initiative, recipient of a 2021 Special Jury Social Justice prize from the GLAMi (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums Innovations) Awards and a 2021 MUSE Award from the American Alliance of Museums. For three years, he also co-produced and co-hosted Flatbush + Main, an award-winning monthly podcast that explored Brooklyn’s past and present through scholarly discussions, historical archives, and oral histories.

Formerly, he was the project manager of Columbia University’s Malcolm X Project, and his oral history interviews informed the late Manning Marable’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. His work on Malcolm X, and more broadly Muslims in America, has been featured in both print and broadcast media, including four documentaries: CNN’s Witnessed: The Assassination of Malcolm X (2015), and Netflix’s Who Killed Malcolm X? (2020), Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali (2021), and Season 2 of High on the Hog (2023).

A committed educator, he has taught courses on United States history, African American history, Islam in America, Malcolm X, and Prince Rogers Nelson. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with a concentration in Afro-American Studies from Harvard University, and Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees in History from Columbia University.