Olga Lucia Torres is a patient rights attorney, narrative medicine lecturer, and healthcare advocate working at the intersection of law, chronic illness, and systems change.

Olga teaches in the Narrative Medicine program as a lecturer at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies.

She has delivered congressional briefings on health equity and clinical trial access and serves on various health equity councils, including the FDA/CTTI Patient Engagement Collaborative.

One of eight founding attorneys of The Bronx Defenders, Olga built her career defending people the system was designed to ignore. That instinct carried into healthcare. Living with chronic illness and a traumatic brain injury, she knows what it means to be the expert who still doesn’t get believed. As a first-generation Latina who grew up translating for family members and neighbors in exam rooms, she came to this work early and came to it personally.

She is the recipient of the Sandra C. Raymond Advocate of the Year Award from the Lupus Foundation of America.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and other national publications.

Olga is currently completing a book sharing her lived experience and research to provide a comprehensive look into the deeply ingrained structural racism of the American healthcare system.