Levi Vonk is an author, medical anthropologist, and the Guerrant Professor of Global Health Equity at UVA. His next book project, tentatively titled When Our Bodies Disappear, investigates a secret border militarization pact between the US and Mexico known as Southern Border Program, which seeks to dismantle the international asylum system and keep migrants out of the US at all costs.

A two-time Fulbright scholar, Levi has been conducting anthropological work with Central American migrants in Mexico since 2015. His first book, Border Hacker, is a work of creative nonfiction and ethnography that follows the journey of an undocumented migrant and computer hacker named Axel. Levi co-authored Border Hacker with Axel using a technique they call "multi-narrator nonfiction," which allows Axel to tell his own story in his own voice, even if he contradicts or criticizes Levi's account of events. Border Hacker was the 2023 honorable mention for the Victor Turner Prize and the Juan E. Méndez Book Award, among others, and the film rights to the book were recently optioned by a Hollywood production studio.

Levi holds a PhD from the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley-UCSF. Before entering academia, he worked as a freelance journalist, stir fry cook, and olive salesman, and he has lived in Mexico, Cuba, England, and the Netherlands.