Asad Dandia

Asad is a New York City tour guide, local historian, community organizer, and the son of working-class immigrants. As a young person, he changed New York City history when he, together with the ACLU, successfully sued the NYPD for discriminatory surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers after 9/11. The resulting policy changes extended civil rights protections to all communities in the city.

Tour guides are the unsung New Yorkers that interact and present NYC to the 60M tourists who visit each year.. Focused on underrepresented communities, erased stories, and the outer boroughs, Asad incorporates oral history, community engagement, and activist fieldwork to shape his work. Every tour he delivers is curated through a deep partnership with local organizations and community leaders with a stake in their neighborhoods.

He launched this work with his new project, New York Narratives, leading walking tours, storytelling and research workshops, and partnerships with museums and cultural institutions. His goal? To build a space to incubate the untold stories of the city and its people and is on track to scale his work by cultivating an army of local historians.