Minja Koskela

Minja Koskela (born 1987) is a Finnish musician, author, politician and member of the Parliament of Finland, the national legislature. A member of the Left Alliance, she has represented Helsinki since April 2023. Koskela was born in 1987. Her father was a policeman and her mother a dental hygienist. She has three younger sisters. Aged three, she joined the Päijät-Häme conservatory's play school in her home town of Lahti. In the second year of high school she moved to Helsinki to study at Sibelius High School. After high school she founded the Mitäs työt collective. Koskela studied music at the Sibelius Academy and gender studies at the University of Tampere. She has master's degree in social sciences and a doctorate in music. Koskela was a music teacher for fiver years before taking a leave of absence to write her dissertation, Democracy Through Pop? Thinking with Intersectionality in Popular Music Education in Finnish Schools (2022). Koskela started writing her social-feminist blog Bluestocking in 2015 and is the author of Ennen kaikkea feministi (2019) and Äidiksi tuleminen (2021). Koskela was asked by several parties to contest parliamentary elections but declined in order to finish her book. She was political secretary to the Feminist Party group on the City Council of Helsinki. She was a political expert for the Left Alliance before becoming executive director of the Association of Finnish Music Education Schools in 2021. She was elected to the City Council of Helsinki at the 2021 Finnish municipal elections.