Usha Chilukuri Vance (born Usha Bala Chilukuri; January 6, 1986^[1]) is an American lawyer. She is the wife of JD Vance, who is the vice president-elect of the United States and Ohio's junior United States senator. Usha Vance will assume the role of Second Lady of the United States on January 20, 2025, becoming the first Indian American and Hindu American to hold the title.^[2]

Vance was born in San Diego to Indian immigrant parents and raised in an upper-middle-class suburb. She graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in history and from Yale Law School with a Juris Doctor degree. After law school, she served as a law clerk for multiple federal judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and Judge Amul Thapar.

Vance was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 2019, and subsequently worked for a leading law firm handling civil litigation and appeals in cases involving higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology. She resigned from her law firm job in July 2024.

At the 2024 Republican National Convention, Vance delivered the introductory address for her husband, JD Vance. She often traveled with him to his vice-presidential campaign events, occasionally appearing onstage. The couple has three children.

Usha Bala Chilukuri^[3][a] was born in 1986 in a suburb of San Diego, California,^[6] to Telugu-speaking Indian immigrants.^[7][8] Her father is a mechanical engineer from IIT Madras and a lecturer at San Diego State University,^[9][10] and her mother is a molecular biologist and provost at the University of California, San Diego.^[11] Her parents are from the Telugu community in Andhra Pradesh, India.^[12][13][14] They migrated to the U.S. in the 1980s.^[12] She was raised in San Diego's upper-middle-class Rancho Peñasquitos suburb.^[15][16]

In 2003, Vance graduated from Mt. Carmel High School, where she performed in the marching band.^[6][17][10] She has one sister, Shreya.^[16] Childhood friends described her as a "leader" and a "bookworm".^[18] She attended Yale University, graduating summa cum laude in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in history, with membership in Phi Beta Kappa.^[3][19] During her time at Yale, Vance volunteered in local elementary schools, served as a Girl Scouts troop leader, and became the editor-in-chief of Our Education, an education policy publication.^[19] After graduating, she taught English and American history as a Yale–China Teaching Fellow at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.^[19][20] Vance then attended Clare College, Cambridge, in England, as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, receiving a Master of Philosophy in early modern history in 2010.^[21]

In 2013, Vance obtained her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where she was the executive development editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.^[22][20][23] During her time at Yale Law, she participated in the Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic, the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, and the Pro Bono Network.^[24][25]

Vance served as a law clerk for Judge Amul Thapar of the District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky from 2013 to 2014, Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2014 to 2015, and Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts from 2017 to 2018.^[26][27][28] During her clerkship at the Supreme Court, she was assigned to work on Azar v. Garza, a case regarding a juvenile undocumented immigrant in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who sought to have an abortion.^[29]

Vance worked for the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson for its San Francisco and Washington, D.C. offices as an associate for almost six years, handling civil litigation and appeals in cases involving higher education, local government, entertainment and technology, until July 2024, when she resigned "to focus on caring for our family".^[30][31][32] Among her clients were the Paramount Pictures, Regents of the University of California, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and a division of The Walt Disney Company.^[33][34][35] Vance previously worked as a summer associate at Williams & Connolly, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, and Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz.^[36] She was admitted to the District of Columbia, California and Ohio bar.^[37][31]

Vance has served on the board of the Gates Cambridge Alumni Association and as secretary of the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.^[38]

At the Republican National Convention in July 2024, Usha Vance delivered the introductory address for her husband, JD Vance.^[39][40] Since then, she has been an advisor to her husband, and often travels with him to campaign events, occasionally appearing onstage with him.^[41] According to some sources, she helped her husband prepare for the 2024 vice-presidential debate.^[41] JD Vance was declared the winner of the debate by several columnists, including some from The New York Times,^[42] The Wall Street Journal,^[43] and Los Angeles Times.^[44] Usha Vance also received some credit for her husband's debate performance.^[45]

In November 2024, as JD Vance became the vice president-elect of the United States, Usha Vance assumed the role of Second Lady of the United States Designate.^[46] In January 2025, she will be the first Indian American, the first Telugu, and the first Hindu Second Lady.^{[47][48][49][50]} She will also be the first Asian American Second Lady.

While at Yale Law School, Chilukuri met her future husband, JD Vance, a relationship encouraged by their professor Amy Chua.^[51] Chua has called their relationship "extremely unlikely, almost opposites of personality".^[52] In 2013, Chilukuri and Vance collaborated to organize a discussion group at Yale focused on "social decline in white America".^[53] Vance often called Chilukuri his "Yale spirit guide".^[52][53]

Chilukuri and Vance married in 2014 in Kentucky, in an interfaith marriage ceremony,^[54][18] her husband's friend Jamil Jivani read from the Bible^[55] and a Hindu pandit blessed the couple.^[53] They have three children and reside in Cincinnati.^[56][57] She is a practicing Hindu, and her husband a Christian^[54][58] who was raised Evangelical but converted to Catholicism in 2019.^[59]

According to public records, in 2014 Chilukuri voted in Democratic primaries, but in 2022, she voted in the Republican primary in which her husband was a candidate.^[18][52] She clerked for conservative judges, such as Roberts and Kavanaugh, but has also practiced at a California law firm with a progressive work culture.^[60] According to The New York Times, her political views seem to have changed over the years, as in 2021, she made a political contribution to the U.S. Senate campaign of a national conservative, Blake Masters.^[53]

Chilukuri has been an avid reader since her early years. In her childhood, she often visited India and was introduced to Indian literature by reading books by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and novelist R. K. Narayan's Malgudi Days, among others.^[12] The "read" books on her Goodreads account include novels by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as nonfiction by Nina Burleigh and Nicholas Kristof.^[53] In 2016, she read her husband's book, Hillbilly Elegy, and gave it a five-star rating.^[53]

Vance's parents are from the Telugu Brahmin community of the West Godavari and Krishna districts of Andhra Pradesh, India.^[12][13][14] They migrated to the U.S. in the 1980s.^[12]

Her paternal ancestry can be traced to Chilukuri Buchipapayya Sastri (c. 18th century), who lived in Saipuram in Vuyyuru Mandal of Krishna district, Andhra Pradesh.^[61][13][12] Later, one branch of the family migrated to Vadluru near Tanuku in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh.^[62] Usha's mother, Lakshmi (née Yechuri), is from Pamarru in Krishna district.^[13][61][1]

Vance's great-aunt, Chilukuri Santhamma, who lives in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, is considered India's oldest active professor at age 96 as of 2024, and has written a book based on the ancient Hindu sacred text Bhagavad Gita.^[63][7] Vance's paternal grandfather, Chilukuri Rama Sastri, taught physics at IIT Madras, and the institute now runs a student award in his memory.^[7] Her paternal aunt lives in Chennai.^[61]

In Hillbilly Elegy (2020), a film about the life of her husband, she was portrayed by actress Freida Pinto.^[64]