Sawant is an economics teacher at Seattle Central Community College and a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 1789.

She was an activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In 2012 Sawant won a 29 per cent with over 20,000 votes as a Socialist Alternative candidate against Democratic WA State House Speaker Frank Chopp – the strongest vote for an independent left-wing candidate in the U.S. in 2012, and the highest vote for a socialist in decades.

Sawant said as a city councilor, she will use her position to help build, unite, and give political voice to the struggles of low-paid workers, youth, people of colour, and all those who are shut out by the political machine that runs this city on behalf of the wealthy elite.

During the campaign she did not accept any corporate funding.

Born to Vasundhara and H T Ramanujam in Pune in 1973, Sawant grew up in Mumbai where she later studied computer science and graduated with a BS from the University of Mumbai in 1994.

Sawant married her husband Vivek, an engineer at Microsoft, and moved to the United States. After moving to the United States Sawant decided to abandon the computer engineering field.

She began to pursue study in economics due to what she described as her own "questions of economic inequality." She entered the economics programme at North Carolina State University where she earned a PhD. She became a United States citizen in 2010.

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