Built the practice from a one-attorney legal-aid project into a 6-attorney firm serving Pinellas, Hillsborough, and Pasco. 412 insurance-denial cases closed for working-class Floridians. Authored the strategy memo that became the model for the Insurance Denial Right-to-Appeal Act.
About Maya
A healthcare-rights attorney from St. Pete. A civic-tech founder. A working mother raising her kids in Tampa.
She has spent six years suing insurance companies on behalf of working-class Floridians whose care was denied. She is running for the State Senate seat that decides whether those denials remain the law of the land.
Maya Adesanya was born in St. Petersburg in 1987, the youngest of three. Her father, Adekunle Adesanya, was a Nigerian-born civil engineer who came to Florida in 1981 to work for the city's stormwater authority. Her mother, Dr. Margaret Adesanya, taught biology at Eckerd College for thirty-one years.
The story Maya tells in the file folder happened in 2008. Her mother had a Stage II diagnosis. The insurance company denied the only treatment that worked, citing a clause buried in the formulary. Her mother appealed. Lost. Appealed again. Lost. By the time Margaret won the third appeal, the cancer had advanced. Margaret recovered, fully, but the year she spent fighting her own insurer is the year Maya decided what kind of lawyer she would become.
She finished law school four years later. She has spent every year since reading insurance denial letters, building cases, and naming the policies that produce them. Florida's Legislature writes those policies. That is why she is running.
Career, on the record
Thirteen years of reading insurance denial letters.
Led the constitutional challenge to Florida HB 1083 (the 2019 prior-authorization expansion). Argued the case in the Eleventh Circuit. Lost the case, won the political fight: HB 1083 was modified in the 2021 session in response to the public record her case built.
Civic-tech nonprofit. Built ClaimWalk, the open-source tool 14,000 Floridians have used to file their own insurance denial appeals. Open-sourced under MIT license; still in production use today at three Florida legal-aid organizations.
Appointed by County Commission. Wrote the policy framework recommending Hillsborough's optional county-level coverage program that was adopted in the 2024 budget. Now serving 8,400 county residents.
Why I am running
I have read every healthcare denial letter Tampa Bay families have brought to me for six years. The letters are the policy. The policy is the law. The law is what I am running to write.
Florida is one of ten states that still refuses to expand Medicaid. 1.2 million Floridians remain uninsured. The State Senate seat for District 23 has the votes in the chamber, if it shows up to cast them. I am running to be the senator who does the reading, returns the calls, and shows up.
Maya, on filing day. January 11, 2026.
Timeline
The short version.
- 1987Born in St. Petersburg, Florida.
- 2005St. Petersburg High School graduate. National Merit Scholar.
- 2009B.A. Political Science, Eckerd College. Graduated summa cum laude.
- 2012J.D., University of Florida Levin College of Law.
- 2013Judicial clerkship, Hon. Charles R. Wilson, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
- 2017Joins Florida Healthcare Equity Coalition as Senior Counsel.
- 2020Founds Pinellas Healthcare Rights Project.
- 2022Launches Adesanya Civic Labs. Builds ClaimWalk.
- 2024HB 7085 Sickle Cell Grant Program (drafted) signed into law. $10M recurring appropriation.
- 2026Files for Florida State Senate, District 23. January 11.
Personal
Home in Seminole Heights.
Maya and her husband Daniel, a Hillsborough County public-school history teacher, live in Seminole Heights with their two children, Adekunle (8) and Aduke (5). They walk to Seminole Heights Elementary. They go to Sunday service at Mt. Zion Progressive Baptist in St. Petersburg, where her late father was a deacon for 27 years.
On Saturday mornings Maya runs the Lake Carroll loop. On Sunday afternoons she reads through the week's legislative session transcripts. She is a slow but devoted cook of Nigerian jollof rice. Her children have not yet been persuaded.