Nayantara Sen

Nayantara is a narrative and cultural strategist, trilingual storyteller, racial and social justice organizer and educator, fiction writer and first-generation Bengali immigrant. She is the Executive Director of the Center for Story-Based Strategy, a 22-year old organization that builds narrative and cultural power for frontline communities and social justice movements at the intersections of poverty, race and pollution, and cultivates radical imagination and narrative strategy spaces for Just Transition, climate and racial justice. [Insert paragraph break] For the last 15 years, Nayantara has built capacity, programs, Innovation Labs, and Narrative Labs at the intersections of story-based, narrative, arts and cultural strategies, social movement strategies, racial and gender justice, immigration, and systems change. Previously, she worked as the: Senior Director of Field and Funder Learning at Pop Culture Collaborative; Director of Narrative & Cultural Strategies at Race Forward; Programs Director at Food Culture Collective, and Lead Designer and Narrative Strategist for the Butterfly & Chrysalis Labs for Immigrant Narrative Strategy. [Insert paragraph break] A previous arts administrator with expertise in oral history, creative writing and Theatre of the Oppressed facilitation, she has held staff, curatorial and consulting roles in museums, film festivals, and community theaters. She is the creator and lead designer of the New York City Racial Equity in the Arts Innovation Lab, a 2-year intensive that taught 60 NYC arts-producing organizations and museums to operationalize racial and cultural equity strategies. She has trained extensively with the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) and Race Forward. She is the author of Butterfly Lab Narrative Project Design Toolkit, the Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity, How the Light Gets In: Narrative Power-Building through the Arts, Storyline Partners’ Stories for Change, and the widely referenced Cultural Strategy Primer. [Insert paragraph break] She serves on the advisory boards of the Framework Institute’s Culture Change Project, MOSAIC America, Food Culture Collective, South Asian SOAR, the Collective Change Lab’s Systems Storytelling Initiative, and is a practitioner-member of AWE (Another World Exists), a national artist and organizing collective. She lives in the Bay Area and loves hiking, poetry, cooking and dancing.