Kamala Devi Harris (/ˈkɑːmələ ˈdeɪvi/ ^ⓘ KAH-mə-lə DAY-vee; born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who served as the 49th vice president of the United States from 2021 to 2025 under President Joe Biden. She is the first female, first African American, and first Asian American U.S. vice president, and the highest-ranking female and Asian American official in U.S. history. Harris represented California in the U.S. Senate from 2017 to 2021 and was the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2024 presidential election.

Born in Oakland, California, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She began her law career in the office of the district attorney of Alameda County. Harris was recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and later to the office of the city attorney of San Francisco. She was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003 and attorney general of California in 2010, and reelected as attorney general in 2014.

Harris was the junior U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021 after winning the 2016 Senate election. She was the second Black woman and first South Asian American U.S. senator. As a senator, Harris advocated for stricter gun control laws, the DREAM Act, federal legalization of cannabis, and reforms to healthcare and taxation. She gained a national profile while asking pointed questions of officials from the first Trump administration during Senate hearings, including President Donald Trump's second U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

Harris sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, but withdrew from the race before the primaries. Biden selected her as his running mate; their ticket defeated the incumbent president and vice president, Trump and Mike Pence, in the 2020 presidential election. When her vice presidency began, Harris presided over an evenly split U.S. Senate. She cast 33 tie-breaking votes, more than any other vice president, including votes to pass the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act.

In July 2024, after Biden withdrew his candidacy from the 2024 presidential election, Harris launched her own presidential campaign with his endorsement. She later became the nominee and selected Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. She lost the election to the Republican nominees, former president Trump and Ohio senator JD Vance.

Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan (1938–2009), was a Tamil biologist who arrived in the United States from India in 1958 to enroll in graduate school in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. A research career of over 40 years followed, during which her work on the progesterone receptor gene led to advances in breast cancer research. Kamala's father, Donald J. Harris (born 1938), is an Afro-Jamaican who immigrated to the United States in 1961 and also enrolled in UC Berkeley, specializing in development economics. The first Black scholar to be granted tenure at Stanford University's economics department, he has emeritus status there. Kamala's parents met in 1962 and married in 1963.

The Harris family lived in Berkeley until they moved in 1966, around Kamala's second birthday. The Harrises lived for a few years in college towns in the Midwest where her parents held teaching or research positions: Urbana, Illinois (where her sister Maya was born in 1966); Evanston, Illinois; and Madison, Wisconsin. By 1970, the marriage had faltered, and Shyamala moved back to Berkeley with her two daughters; the couple divorced when Kamala was seven.

During the early 1970s, Harris often went with her mother to Chennai, India, where they stayed with her maternal grandfather. She learned to wear traditional Indian dress and speak a few phrases of the Tamil language.