About Anu
Say: “uh-Nuu”
Lawyer, Scientist, Educator, Mindfulness Teacher, founder & CEO of BE MORE with Anu, and author of the award-winning, best-selling book Breaking Bias (2024)
Anu Gupta is an award-winning author, human rights lawyer, scientist, scholar of bias, mindfulness teacher, and the founder and CEO of BE MORE with Anu, an edtech company that trains individuals and organizations bridge divides and build trust using mindfulness-based tools. He is the author of Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel them (2024) with a foreword from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Anu’s work has reached 300+ organizations, training more than 100,000 professionals and impacting over 30 million lives. As a gay immigrant of color, he came to the work of breaking bias after almost ending his life due to lifelong experiences with racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. The realization that bias can be unlearned helped lead him out of that dark point and inspired a lifelong mission to build a global movement for social healing based on principles of mindfulness and compassion.
Anu has lived, studied, and worked globally, which informs his unique perspective on how different forms of biases – whether they are race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or class-based – use the same neural mechanism to create inequities and inefficiencies in different organizational and cultural contexts.
A peer-reviewed author, his original research was supported by competitive grants from the National Science Foundation, American Heart Association, New York State Health Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Focus For Health Foundation, and Echoing Green. He has written and spoken extensively, including on the TED stage, the Oprah Conversation, TIME, Fast Company, Newsweek, Inc Magazine, People, and Vogue Business.
Anu has a JD from NYU Law, MPhil in Development Studies from Cambridge, and BA in Int’l Relations and Islamic Studies, summa cum laude, from NYU. Prior to law, he served as a Fulbright middle school teacher in South Korea, studied Spanish in Mexico, worked on international women's rights issues at the UN, and founded an educational nonprofit in Myanmar/Burma.
He is a lifetime Fellow of the Mind & Life Institute and a Systems Designer for Penn State Dickinson Law School's Antiracist Development Institute (ADI). He is a student of Buddhism and Kriya Yoga and he has spent over 10,000 hours on retreat at meditation communities in the US and Asia. He is a 500-hour certified yoga and meditation teacher and has served on the boards of many nonprofits and social enterprises.
Learn more about Anu at anuguptany.com and follow him @anuguptany across social channels.
“Dr. King said, ‘Our goal is to build a beloved community. This will require qualitative shifts in our souls and quantitative shifts in our lives.’ Breaking all forms of biases is how we make such qualitative and quantitative shifts. If you doubt this proposition, become mindful of that thought and ask: if we can imagine colonizing Mars, what stops us from imagining living on Earth without bias?” - Anu Gupta
Anu founded BE MORE in 2014 with a vision:
to inspire a movement of organizations and individuals that are shifting us Beyond Equality Movement of Opportunities Rising for Everyone — or
BE MORE.
Our vision is memorialized in:
ANU’S SCHOLARSHIP
Take a look at Anu’s original research
Since 2003, Anu has been studying, writing, researching, publishing, and working in the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), antiracism, and human rights fields. Learn more about his work around systemic racism, mindfulness and bias reduction, and virtual learning theory.
