Andrea Nieves

About Andrea

updated 6/2013: Andrea is a Puerto Rican American born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Andrea graduated  magna cum laude  and  Phi Beta Kappa  from Occidental College in 2007 with a B.A. in American Studies. During college, she studied art history in Siena, Italy and mentored at-risk middle school students. Andrea attended New York University School of Law on a full scholarship from the NYU Bickel & Brewer Latino Institute for Human Rights. While in law school, Andrea dedicated herself to fighting for social justice for low-income people of color and youth. She represented immigrant youth facing deportation, children in the juvenile delinquency system and adults serving life and death sentences in the rural American South. These experiences led her to a two-year post-graduate fellowship with the Fair Trial Initiative, where she represented indigent clients facing the death penalty at trial. As a Henry Luce Scholar Andrea works at the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (KontraS) in Jakarta, Indonesia. Andrea researches and writes about the death penalty and past human rights abuses that occurred under the regime of Indonesian dictator Soeharto. She balances her work at KontraS by hanging out in Jakarta’s many shopping malls with her new Indonesian friends,weekly public yoga classes in beautiful Suropati Park, and scuba diving throughIndonesia’s fascinating and diverse coral reefs.