Meet Your Coordinator

Zahra Bundrage is an educator, instructional leader, and advocate whose career has been centered on expanding educational opportunities and strengthening the systems that serve students, educators, families, and communities across New Mexico.

Zahra’s educational journey has never followed just one lane, which is probably why she has never been particularly interested in staying inside one academic box. Her background moves across secondary education, adult and higher education, English language learning, literature and rhetoric, instructional leadership, and research. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education with a concentration in TESOL and a minor in Language Arts and holds endorsements in both ESL and Social Studies. She later earned a Master’s degree in English with a focus on Literature and Rhetoric and an Education Specialist degree in Instructional Leadership. Her master’s research examined the ways Whiteness is constructed in opposition to Blackness in British literature, a project that somehow also sent Zahra and her mother down a very long rabbit hole in Egypt exploring the centuries old debate surrounding Cleopatra’s racial identity. Her doctoral journey has been equally unconventional. After completing the coursework for her Doctor of Education in Instructional Leadership through a doctoral pathway that did not require a dissertation, she decided she was not quite finished with research and returned to complete the dissertation process. Her current research brings her back to where much of her career began, focusing on adult English language learners and exploring the intersections of social emotional learning, motivation, and the experiences adult learners bring with them into the classroom.

Her professional experience has taken her through nearly every corner of education, from K–12 classrooms to adult education, higher education, professional learning, and educational leadership. Before joining the Office of African American Affairs, Zahra worked as an ESL instructor, ESL department lead, and professional learning leader, while also stepping into higher education as an adjunct instructor. Her work has not always stayed neatly inside the classroom either. She has helped design and develop adult education curriculum focused on early childhood education and has spent much of her career thinking about what happens when good teaching meets systems that do not always work equally well for everyone. Working directly with students and educators has kept her grounded in what education looks like on the ground, while her leadership and research experience have pushed her to ask bigger questions about access, opportunity, and who our educational systems are actually designed to serve. Zahra is particularly passionate about ensuring that community voice is not separated from educational decision making. Her work has included educator advocacy, professional learning, student and practitioner needs assessments, qualitative research, community engagement, and the development of partnerships designed to connect what communities are experiencing with the programs and resources intended to serve them.

As a woman of both African and Middle Eastern descent, Zahra has spent more than twenty years in the United States navigating what it means to belong to cultures that do not always fit neatly into a single box. She identifies as African American, but her relationship with identity, language, culture, and belonging has been shaped by living across worlds rather than within just one. Those experiences are a big part of what she brings to her work. As an immigrant, educator, researcher, and mother, she is especially interested in the conversations that get complicated when we stop treating Blackness as one shared experience. Questions about who belongs, who gets seen, how language changes the way we are perceived, what we keep or lose as we adapt, and how culture follows us into educational spaces are not simply academic questions for Zahra. They are questions she has spent much of her own life navigating, and they continue to shape how she approaches cultural responsiveness, education, and the incredible diversity that exists within Black communities.

In her role as Education Advancement Coordinator with the New Mexico Office of African American Affairs, Zahra focuses on educational advancement across the continuum, from K–12 education through higher education, adult learning, and career pathways. Her work includes Black student achievement and belonging, culturally responsive education, Black educator recruitment and retention, youth development, college and career readiness, family and community engagement, and statewide educational partnerships.

Through Education Advancement, Zahra works to bring together research, community knowledge, student and educator voices, and strategic partnerships to develop meaningful programs and resources for African American communities throughout New Mexico. Her approach is grounded in a central belief that those most affected by educational systems should have a meaningful voice in shaping how those systems move forward.