Shivani Parikh (she/her) is a housing defense attorney at Queens Legal Services, where she represents low-income tenants in New York City’s Right to Counsel program and defends against eviction, landlord harassment, and housing instability. Her work centers on immigrant and South Asian working-class communities navigating overlapping systems of surveillance, labor exploitation, and displacement. She also serves on the steering committee of Legal Services NYC’s Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Affinity Group. Shivani is the Founder and Executive Director of the South Asian Legal Defense Fund (SALDF), a nonprofit advancing civil rights, economic justice, and civic infrastructure for South Asian American communities. Her advocacy focuses on challenging the racialized legacy of the War on Terror, including its surveillance apparatus and its expansion into the policing of dissent, while supporting community-led strategies for legal empowerment and movement building.
In addition to her legal work, Shivani serves as Vice President of Social Media for the South Asian Indo-Caribbean Bar Association of Queens (SAICBA-Q) and as the South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA) representative for Fordham Law’s Alumni Attorneys of Color. She is also the impact producer for a forthcoming documentary directed by Sundance Institute Fellow Sara Chishti, which uplifts the organizing legacy of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) and documents the ongoing debt crisis facing medallion drivers excluded from the city’s loan restructuring program. NYTWA is the only South Asian founded, led and majority labor union in the United States.
Shivani’s work sits at the intersection of housing justice, racial formation, and diaspora organizing, with a focus on building power among Desi communities historically excluded from legal and political representation. She holds a B.S. from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a J.D. as a Stein Scholar for Public Interest and Ethics in the Law from Fordham Law School.
Shivani is a Speaker for the Rising Up to Serve: Leveraging Bar Associations for Community-Centered Lawyering program.