Graduate Assistants

Alani Fujii (she/her)

Graduate Assistant
Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, American Studies
Hometown: Silver Spring, MD
 
Alani is a first-year PhD student in the American Studies department. She is interested in the relationship between Blackness and Pacific indigeneities, and is starting to accept that she might be a poet/really into the work that poetry can do. Before Yale, Alani volunteered in the Peace Corps and worked as an administrative officer in the federal government.
 
What Alani loves about The House: “It’s exciting to support programming that uplifts Black students at Yale! I hope that even more students across all the university can find a sense of belonging here.”

Arielle Hudson (She/Her) 
Graduate Assistant 
Yale Law School 
Hometown: Tunica, MS 
 
Arielle is a first-year law student at Yale Law School pursuing her Juris Doctorate degree. In July of 2022, she graduated from the University of Oxford in Oxford, United Kingdom, with a Qualifying Law Degree. Arielle obtained her BA in Education from the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in 2020 and became a certified Secondary Education teacher in the state of Mississippi. In 2020, Arielle became the first African American woman from the University of Mississippi to become a Rhodes Scholar. She was also inducted into the university’s Hall of Fame. Arielle was most recently selected as a Marshall-Motley Scholar by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund through their mission to endow the South with its next generation of civil rights litigators. After graduating from Yale, Arielle will return to Mississippi to practice civil rights law. She hopes to continue Mississippi’s legacy of civil rights activism by using the law to fight for racial justice and radical social change.
 
What Arielle loves about The House: “I love that The House is a hub for all things Blackness: Black people, Black excellence, Black celebration, Black joy, Black love, Black solidarity. The House has served as a safe space and place of community for so many generations of Black people at Yale, and I am honored to be able to continue the legacy of bringing more Black folks into The House to feel loved, appreciated, and cared for in all their Blackness.