Aanya Gupta is a Senior at Horace Mann High School in Bronx, New York, and a Soprano at the Manhattan School of Music.

In the summer of 2020, while world was in Covid and school was on zoom, Aanya felt that she and her friends needed more interaction with each other, so she started an afternoon games club on zoom to support everyone – no agenda, no learning, no rules – just a safe place where any HM middle schooler could join and play interactive games with others…we laughed, we played and we made sure we all got through Covid together.

Aanya has been a music enthusiast since a very young age starting as a violinist and a hip-hop dancer and had always found comfort from music. Having attended pre-college programs in neuroscience at Columbia and Brown, and sung for older people with dementia, Aanya realized how music can support mental health.

Amazed by the widespread crisis in teenage mental health, Aanya became a vocal teen mental health advocate, and in 2022 founded
The H.U.M.AN.S. Initiative: Healing mental health Using Music ANd Song to support her peers. While initially designed to be an awareness campaign for teenage mental health, the initiative has gained significant traction and recognition, and quickly developed to be much more.