- In full:
- Usha Bala Chilukuri Vance
- Born:
- January 6, 1986, San Diego, California, U.S.
- Notable Family Members:
- spouse JD Vance
Usha Vance
Who is Usha Vance?
What religion does Usha Vance practice?
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Usha Vance (born January 6, 1986, San Diego, California, U.S.) is the second lady of the United States and the first Indian American and practicing Hindu to hold the role. Married to U.S. Vice Pres. J.D. Vance, Usha Vance is also the youngest second lady since the Harry S. Truman administration.
Early life
Usha Chilukuri was born to Telugu Indian parents who emigrated from Andhra Pradesh and settled in San Diego. Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is a biologist and administrator at the University of California, San Diego, and her father, Radhakrishna Chilukuri, is an engineer at San Diego State University, working within the department of aerospace engineering. Usha Chilukuri told Fox News that she was raised as a practicing Hindu.
“I did grow up in a religious household. My parents are Hindu, and that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people.” —Usha Vance in a 2024 interview with Fox News
As a child, Chilukuri evinced strong leadership skills. As a family friend told The New York Times in 2022, “She decided which board games we were going to play and what the rules were going to be. She was never mean or unkind, but she was the boss.” In high school, Chilukuri played the flute in the marching band and participated in trivia competitions.
Chilukuri attended Yale University, graduating summa cum laude in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in history. She then attended the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, receiving a master’s of philosophy in 2010 in early modern history.
Legal career
Chilukuri matriculated at Yale Law School in 2010. During her time there, Chilukuri was the executive development editor of The Yale Law Journal. She also helped run the Yale Journal of Law & Technology as a managing editor. Chilukuri participated in clinics related to U.S. Supreme Court advocacy and media freedom as well as working on the school’s assistance project for Iraqi refugees.
She graduated from Yale in 2013 and went on to serve as a clerk to two federal judges, Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and Judge Amul Thapar of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. In 2015 she joined the San Francisco office of law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson before returning to clerking, this time for Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Roberts, for the 2017–18 term. She rejoined Munger, Tolles & Olson in 2019 as an associate, where she worked until 2024. At Munger, Tolles & Olson, she worked in civil litigation for such clients as a division of the Walt Disney Company and the Regents of the University of California.
Marriage to Vance
In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016), J.D. Vance discusses his experiences with feeling out of place at Yale after growing up in poverty-stricken Appalachia. While at a formal dinner, he mentions calling Usha Chilukuri in private to ask her which silverware to use for each course. She reportedly told Vance, “Go from outside to inside, and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes.”
Chilukuri met her husband, J.D. Vance, when they were both students at Yale Law School. According to a 2022 article in The New York Times, the pair, who began as friends, organized a discussion group about “social decline in white America.” Chilukuri, who Vance described as his “Yale spirit guide,” helped Vance to feel less out-of-place at the elite institution. The pair married in 2014 and have four children: sons Ewan Blaine (b. 2017), Vivek (b. 2020), and Alec Neel (b. 2026) and daughter Mirabel Rose (b. 2021).
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J.D. Vance went on to publish his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (2016), in which he mentions Usha Vance’s immense influence in his life. At the time, he was working in venture capital for tech investor Peter Thiel, whom he had originally met in 2011. Thiel recommended J.D. Vance as a suitable vice president for Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. In 2024 Trump confirmed Vance as his running mate, and Usha Vance left her litigation career.
J.D. Vance, who was elected the 50th U.S. vice president in 2024, has said that he appreciates his wife’s guidance and opinions. “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do that,’ ” Vance told media personality Megyn Kelly in a 2020 interview on her podcast. Usha Vance introduced her husband at the 2024 Republican National Convention, during which she discussed the differences in their backgrounds and the role it had played in his election into the vice presidency.
As second lady
Vance has kept a relatively low profile as second lady, saying in a Free Press interview in April 2025 that “the highest priority right now is to be actually a normal person.”
Usha Vance’s family has ancestral ties to the village of Vadluru in Andhra Pradesh. When Pres. Donald Trump’s victory was announced, the village set off firecrackers and celebrated. The news was met with disappointment, however, in Kamala Harris’s ancestral village of Thulasendrapuram in Tamil Nadu.
Early in Trump’s second administration, Vance accompanied her husband on an official trip to Europe, where the couple met with French Pres. Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Also early in 2025 Trump appointed Vance to the Kennedy Center board of trustees as part of his ideological overhaul of the institution and chose Vance to lead the presidential delegation to the 2025 Special Olympics World Winter Games in Turin, Italy.
In March 2025 Vance was scheduled to visit Greenland, but the trip’s itinerary, which included plans to visit the capital, was met with derision from many local politicians. The territory, which remains partially under Danish control, was one that Trump had suggested taking over because of its wealth in minerals. The trip was amended for Vance and her husband to visit the U.S. Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland instead.
Political leanings
Vance’s political leanings came under increased scrutiny during and after her husband’s campaign. A Washington Post profile in 2024 noted that she “rarely—if ever—volunteered her opinions on the nation’s bitterly partisan politics,” and Business Insider described her as “tight-lipped” about her views. Friends and colleagues told reporters that she had condemned the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and had long been “generally appalled” by Trump. Others, however, characterized her as largely apolitical. A Republican strategist close to J.D. Vance’s campaign later claimed that Usha Vance, like her husband, had undergone a shift in outlook and now “fully supports Donald Trump and her husband and will do whatever she can to ensure their victory this November.”