Welcome! Here you will find glimpses of my contributions to the collective dream-work of building a better world. I am an educator, trainer, and restorative justice practitioner working at the borders of criminalization, intergenerational trauma, structural violence and youth empowerment. With over a decade of experience in schools, prisons, re-entry, juvenile justice, and community settings, I bring deep commitment to peacebuilding, violence prevention, and healing.
Using personal narrative and embodied practice, I deepen conversations across difference and cultivate humanizing relationships. I integrate tools from multiple traditions to recover human connection between people at multiple ends of historical injustice.
I seek opportunities for dialogue and accountability regarding systemic oppression and the way it manifests in interpersonal relationships. I mobilize my survivorship from violence for radical love, with an eye toward (dis)ability, disrupting power & hierarchy, and stopping harm.
As an artist-facilitator in people’s movements for justice and dignity, I aim to creatively render and imagine solutions to social problems by centralizing the voices of those who directly experience them. I have innovated several programs in carceral settings and have been recognized as a leader in holding trauma-informed, liberatory spaces with incarcerated people through participatory theater and personal transformation. My curriculum "A Mirror, A Threshold, A Song: Medicines of Healing in Theater Arts and Restorative Justice" is available for digital purchase and limited orders in print.
Inspired by the rich tradition of Bengali cultural resistance, I learned theater in the movement and in the streets of my community. I support others to agitate through storytelling and implementing creative strategies for change. My lineage of bravery, truth-telling, and action is tempered by my caste-privileged Hindu heritage. I hold anti-caste and caste abolition politics, and draw inspiration from Dalit and Bahujan activists in excavating and exposing legacies of caste violence in the South Asian diaspora.
My teachers include Mimi Kim, bell hooks, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Badal Sircar, Audre Lorde, Selma James, Augusto Boal, Jerzy Grotowski, Silvia Federici, June Jordan, Mahasweta Devi, Armand Volkas, Luis Valdez, Mia Mingus, and countless students, collaborators and co-conspirators across the years.
Influences, Skills, & Guiding Frameworks
Popular Education & Participatory Action Research (Paolo Freire); Theatre of the Oppressed; Youth Leadership & Youth Development; Restorative Justice & Alternative Discipline Practices in Schools; Transformative Justice & Prison Abolition;
Reconciliation & Victim-Offender Dialogue in Communities, Prison, Re-Entry; Disability Justice & Inclusion; Intersectionality & Intersectional Feminist Analysis (steering committee of INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence - Boston, Kimberle Crenshaw, my queer & trans community of color/chosen family); Drama Therapy (Masters level coursework, California Institute for Integral Studies); Community-Based Non-Legal Conflict Mediation (affiliate and trainer, SEEDS Community Resolution Center); Poor Theater, Intimate Theater, Physical Theater (Arka Mukhopadhyay, Bibhaban, Alternative Living Theatre, other performance collectives in Kolkata, West Bengal); Writing Coach, Facilitator, Editor (tutor, Harvard College Writing Center 2006-08); Counter-Militarism & Truth-in-Recruiting (Susan Quinlan, Pablo Paredes, Ty Marshall, Abe Velazquez)
"I’ve been working at Juvenile Hall for 20 years and I have never seen the kids so engaged. I mean, out of their seat, paying attention, being positive." - Juvenile Justice Probation Officer