Meet Anjali Taneja, MD MPH

Legislation and Organizing

• Under Anjali’s leadership, Casa de Salud has also been a steering team lead organization in the New Mexico Together for Healthcare Campaign, where health workers around the state, among many others, have helped pass game-changing legislation each of the last few years in New Mexico — including the Healthcare Affordability Fund; the Patient Debt Collections Protections Act; the Health Benefits for Certain Non-Citizens Act; Medicaid Forward; and in the 2024 legislative session – Healthcare Affordability Fund Distribution.

• Anjali worked with other physicians and advocates to help conceptualize a bill to ensure access to evidence-based medication treatment for opioid addictions, in prisons and jails across New Mexico

Boards and Appointments:

• In 2023, the Bernalillo County Commission appointed Anjali to the University of New Mexico Hospital Board of Trustees to represent the needs of county residents. 

• In 2023, the New Mexico Legislative Council appointed Anjali to the New Mexico Insurance Nominating Committee. 

• In 2021, Anjali was appointed to the New Mexico Primary Care Council, where she has also served as Chair of the Equity Workgroup. 

• In 2020, Anjali was also appointed to the New Mexico Governor’s Council on Racial Justice, which made policy and executive recommendations to the governor about policy changes for racial justice in health. 

• In 2020, Anjali was a founding member of the Coalition for a Safer Albuquerque, and continues as a lead steering team member. 

• In 2017, Anjali was appointed by the Bernalillo County Commission, to the inaugural Addiction Treatment Advisory Board and continues to serve on this board (the only addictions treatment advisory group of experts and peers, in the great Albuquerque metro area). 

Awards & Achievements

• In 2022, Anjali was awarded the PNM Award for Individual Excellence in Ethical Business Practice, one of six statewide awards at the annual New Mexico Ethics in Business Awards. 

• Last year she was asked to co-host/MC the awards event, which she was honored to do. Anjali’s work has been featured on NPR’s The Well Women Show and the How to Survive the End of the World podcast. 

• In 2020, Anjali was selected as one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women we Love, featuring LGBTQ+ women across the United States who are working for change. 

• She was also selected as a  Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar (2016-2019), a Next City Vanguard 40 under 40 Urban Leader (2016), and a member of the international Creating Health Collaborative – a collaborative of health innovators invited to share their visions of health beyond healthcare. 

• Anjali co-founded the Healing Histories Project, whose aim is to create popular education tools to build collective safety and wellness (she stepped off the project in 2021). 

• Anjali founded CureThis, an online community space bringing healthcare workers and community members together, for discussion and inspiration around new models of care.

• In 2010, Anjali served as a lead coordinating member of the Peoples’ Movement Assembly for Healing Justice and Liberation, at the United States Social forum in Detroit, Michigan.

• She also oversaw the medic response volunteer team for this event attended by over 18,000 people. 

• More than a decade ago, Anjali served as the medical director for the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center’s addiction treatment program, providing methadone treatment for people with opioid addictions who were incarcerated at the county jail. 

  • Her advocacy to preserve the program when a warden wanted to unilaterally discontinue this treatment in the jail led to her being escorted out of the jail under threat of being handcuffed – and led to a community advocacy response that resulted in permanently protecting and expanding the treatment program. 

  • She has tirelessly continued to advocate for and help create conditions to improve care of our brothers and sisters in the jail, to build a continuum of care for people coming out of jail, to improve quality of life and family reconnection for people leaving the jail, and to reduce recidivism.
    
    

Education & Fellowships

• Anjali completed her family medicine residency training and a fellowship year at Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles

• She completed medical school at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School

• Anjali completed a Masters in Public Health from Columbia Mailman School of Public Health

• She graduated from Lehigh University with a BA in International Studies and a BA in Biology.

• She served as the Jack Rutledge Fellow for Universal Health Care at the American Medical Student Association in the Washington DC area. 

• Upon graduation from medical school she was a founding board member of the National Physicians Alliance, a national organization committed to healthcare access, professional integrity in the field of medicine, and health justice. She served a five year term on the NPA board.
  
  

Anjali sees her work as bridge work between healers and healthcare providers, and collaborative accountable work on models of community care that are responsive to the community and that inspire a new paradigm of care while pushing back on the medical industrial complex that has caused great harm in the United States. She also sees music as a creative outlet and a healing modality, and has DJed at clubs around the country for almost 20 years. For five years, Anjali was a resident DJ at New York City’s popular monthly MUTINY party featuring electronic, experimental, drum’n’bass, hiphop, and world music. Anjali is running for the NM House of Representatives to fight for creative, upstream and intersectional solutions to some of our biggest structural and collective challenges. She’s running because, here in New Mexico, we care for each other and lead with love. And she’s running because she believes in a vision that the future of New Mexico belongs to all of us.