Draft:Natalie ornell

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Natalie Bianca Ornell is a mixed race Central South Asian (Afghan/North Indian/Pakistani) and European public school teacher, journalist and human rights advocate born as a U.S. citizen in Munich, Germany in 1990. In 1996, she and her mother immigrated back to her mother's home state of Massachusetts following her Afghan father's wrongful death for a minor non-violent incident that was not his fault at Stadelheim Prison in Munich. This operative prison executed Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Nazi Resistance by guillotine during World War II and was known for anti-Semitic practices such as forcing prisoners to eat the bodies of deceased European Jews.

Her father, Nasser Amosgar (formerly Hotaki of the Hotaki Dynasty) was a law student and medical student at Tubingen University who left Afghanistan in 1971 as a child before the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. His family sold Afghan rugs in Europe and his father was a teacher of the German language at the Goethe Institute. His grandfather was a judge in Kabul. Ornell's mother grew up in Dorchester and is of Irish, Swedish and French-Canadian descent.

Ornell attended elementary and middle school in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts where she received the Presidental Award for academic excellence along with awards for her artwork for D.A.R.E. She later attended the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge on scholarship and earned nearly a full ride to Wellesley College as a QuestBridge Scholar. During her time at Wellesley College, she wrote for newspapers including the Sampan and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. She later earned her M.A. at UC Berkeley in Asian Studies where she published book interviews and articles for China Digital Times and scripts for the WGBH Link Asia show before reporting for Quincy's Patriot Ledger where she wrote hundreds of stories that were also published in WCVB and the Associated Press. Her Master's thesis explored the work of human rights lawyers in China and the cases they took on at personal risk. During her time working as a grant writer for the Asian American Civic Association in Boston Chinatown where she raised over $2 million for immigrants from over 100 countries, Ornell graduated from a lobbying course called the Commonwealth Seminar, organized local and national coalitions to get a bill she proposed to her state Senator, Walter Timilty, to permanently recognize Rosa Parks on MBTA buses, successfully passed into law in 15 months. Her work was featured in the Boston Globe, Harvard Crimson, and on the Callie Crossley show "Under the Radar."

Ornell worked in public education in Quincy and Boston Public Schools for 5 years after earning a second Master's in Education at Lesley University and published student writing in magazines and online. She became a vocal advocate for Afghan women following the end of the botched withdrawal in Afghanistan. Ornell is working on her first novel called Dear Simone which is an indictment of modern prisons and a call for the world to end Nazism and white supremacy once and for all.