Team

The Third Eye is developed by a team of educators, documentary filmmakers, storytellers.

Dipta Bhog

Head of Research, Innovation and Partnerships

Dipta Bhog has worked on gender and education for close to three decades. She has worked as a journalist and women’s rights activist. She co-founded Nirantar, a Centre for Gender and Education in Delhi, and has extensive experience of working on women’s literacy, adult and girls education and rural journalism at the level of program design, implementation, policy and impact. She coordinated a five-state study titled Textbook Regimes that analysed school textbooks from a feminist lens and has worked on writing textbooks for both national and state governments. More recently, her research work focused on women leaders from rural areas and small towns who run non-governmental organizations. She redesigned and presently conducts CREA’s Institute on Feminist leadership and Movement Building in South Asia and East Africa. Dipta Bhog was instrumental in initiating Khabar Lahariya, which started as a newspaper in 2002, and has been involved in training the team of rural women journalists. Her research on young girls and their collectives resulted in Birdbox, an audio-video installation in the shape of a re-engineered bioscope, where you can bear witness to conversations of young girls from Bhopal, Lucknow and Karvi, on desire, love, shame and freedom. Dipta loves walking her dogs and dreaming of living next to the sea.

Shabani Hassanwalia

Editor

Shabani is a writer and filmmaker, making non-fiction text, sound and images in various media since the year 2000. Her work engages with changing socio-political realities, volatile subcultures and intimate personal histories in an India-in-transition. A graduate in English Literature, Delhi University and post graduate from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, her feature documentaries include Being Bhaijaan (2014), Gali (2017) and Out of Thin Air (2009). She is an INLAKS Fellow, and worked at The Sundance Institute, Los Angeles and the Documentary Filmmakers Group, London, as part of the fellowship. She was a core editorial team member of Delhi’s First City magazine for over a decade. She has worked extensively with adolescent girls and women in rural India on social disruption through digital storytelling. She is a desktop art collector, and you can contact her for cutting edge screen savers.

Ruchika Negi

Associate Editor

Ruchika is a filmmaker and educator, with an interest in critical and creative pedagogical practices. Her films include Two Autumns in Wyszogród, Every Time You Tell A Story, Malegaon Times and ML 05 B 6055. She also works with sound and text based forms. She has been awarded artistic residencies at Khoj Studio, Delhi, Parco Arte Vivente Experimental Centre for Contemporary Art, Turin and Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski, Warsaw, and is the recipient of Charles Wallace India Trust Short – Term Fellowship, 2016. Ruchika taught in a documentary film program, the Creative Documentary Course (Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication, New Delhi) from 2015 to 2019, and occasionally teaches film at the Ashoka University, Sonipat. Processes, methods, mediums excite her much more than their end results.

Nisha Susan

Consulting Editor, Digital Strategy and Partnerships

Nisha Susan is a writer and editor. She grew up in India, Nigeria and Oman and lives in Bangalore. She is the co-founder of two award-winning media companies, The Ladies Finger and Grist Media. She currently writes Cheap Thrills, a column on millennials, time and obsessions for Mint Lounge. She was formerly Features Editor, Tehelka magazine and also commissioning editor for Yahoo! Originals, a longform destination for Yahoo! India. Her non-fiction is focused on culture, gender and politics. Her fiction has been published by n+1, Caravan, Penguin, Zubaan and others and often explores the intimacy and strangeness that the internet has brought to India. Her first collection of short fiction The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook & Other Stories was published in August 2020.

Sadia Saeed

Technical Head, Editorial Coordinator

Sadia is a post-graduate in Library and Information Science and joined Nirantar in 2002 as a librarian. Gradually, she started handling all Nirantar publications from design assistance to writing to translations to proofreading. Deeply interested in new and emerging technologies, Sadia shows the team what self-directed learning can do, and is always found between new plugins, software and fonts. She is probably any food delivery app’s favourite customer.

Suman Parmar

Senior Content Editor, Hindi

Books and zest for reading led her to a Masters in Hindi Literature from Delhi University and a diploma in journalism from IIMC. She has worked at Big FM, as a reporter for Dainik Bhaskar where she wrote on films, culture and social issues, handled digital media in BBC Hindi, and as an editor with Rajkamal Prakasha and Drishti Publications.

She has translated as well as edited a number of bestselling books, including Devdutt Pattanaik’s Meri Geeta and Meghna Gulzar’s Woh Jo Hai. Culture, gender and education are her prime areas of interest.

Madhuri Adwani

Podcast Producer

Madhuri revels in storytelling and uses it as a tool to create dialogues between different communities and generations of women. When she is not recording or taking interviews, she is at her Kahaniyon Ka Adda on YouTube, finding and documenting everyday acts of rebellion. As a learner and a practitioner from the field of humanities, she constantly pushes to critically examine structures around her till she finds a way to talk about it over a cup of coffee.

Shivam Rastogi

Video Producer, Image Editor

Shivam is a photographer and filmmaker, who is constantly trying to make sense of the world from behind the camera. A graduate in Journalism & Mass Communication, IP University and post graduate from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, Shivam has previously worked with Film Companion and Memesys Culture Lab. You can find him archiving light and everyday frames that he captures on Instagram. He also likes not having to talk about himself in the third person.

Sohnee Harshey

Communications Strategy Specialist

With an academic background in History, Social Work, and Women’s Studies, Sohnee is a feminist researcher and aspiring educator. Currently, she leads the communication strategy work at Nirantar and The Third Eye. By combining research with dynamic communication tools, Sohnee imagines an accessible and visual future for text. Sohnee was part of the founding team of Economic and Political Weekly’s digital initiative Engage where she was involved in creating new knowledge formats to demystify social sciences research. Before that, her work at the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at TISS, Mumbai involved building and strengthening academic resources in Indian languages. Her fieldwork experiences with marginalised women in rural Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and with forest-dependent communities in Gujarat have shaped her feminist consciousness and desire for collaborative work. Sohnee feels particularly invested in thinking about sites of knowledge production through questions of gendered labour, climate justice, language, and memory. As a person with many creative interests, Sohnee considers herself a champion of to-do lists.

Astha Bamba

Researcher and Field Facilitator

Astha is a recent graduate in English Literature from Delhi University. She was the coordinator at the Women’s Development Cell in LSR and has worked as a researcher and writer for Ashoka University, Sangat, and Feminism in India.

As a student experiencing online education in an almost privatized public university succumbing to the neo-liberal market, she is constantly imagining more equal classrooms and values collaborative learning. She also grapples with questions of carceral justice and seeks to learn transformative, and feminist ways of practicing reform and community accountability.

When she is not procrastinating, you can find her experimenting in the kitchen.

Juhi Jotwani

Writer and Researcher

Juhi has graduated in literary and cultural studies, along with a fellowship in Urban Studies from Indian Institute for Human Settlements. She has worked with Citizen Matters, Bengaluru as a reporter and hopes to build her video editing, creative-writing, and cooking skills. She has never said no to a pizza and her muse is her misanthropic cat – Gabbar.

@Nirantar

Archana Dwivedi

Director, Nirantar Trust

Archana has more than 18 years of work experience in the areas of gender and education. In Nirantar, along with steering the organisational projects, her major involvement has been in researching and writing on issues of women’s empowerment and young people’s education and empowerment from a feminist perspective. Her engagement on these issues has further been strengthened by the work at the field level with women and girls belonging to marginalised communities. She believes in making research accessible to grass roots organisations and, thus, transcreates these into training and learning material for facilitators, field-based activists, and organisations.

Nirantar Board

Renuka Mishra

Renuka has a Master’s degree in social work from Delhi University. After working as a psychiatric social worker in England she taught at Rajasthan University in the Department of Adult Education. In 1976 she started a bi-lingual journal on development issues called How / Kaise. During the publication of How she networked extensively with NGOs across the country. Jag Sakhi, a 12-part serial on Women and Empowerment was produced by Renuka in collaboration with CENDIT for UNICEF. She worked with Action India for over 10 years organizing agricultural labourers and stone quarry workers in Mehrauli, Delhi. She has been closely associated with the Mahila Samakhya programme from its inception as a trainer, resource person and evaluator. She is a founder member of Nirantar and has been closely associated with the development of Broadsheets for neo literate women, promoting innovations in Continuing Education and in writing of health curriculum for rural educators and learners. At present, she is engaged with deepening her understanding of Vedic texts and strengthening engagement of Sanskrit scholars working on these.

Sarojini Nadimpally

Sarojini has been working on public health and women’s health issues in India for the last three decades. She is one of the founders of Sama Resource Group for Women and Health that works at the intersection of public health, human rights and marginalization. She is the national co-convenor of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, and coordinator of Gender Justice Circle of People’s Health Movement Global. She has led several studies, fact-findings and advocacy initiatives over the past two decades on health systems, medical and reproductive technologies, conflict and public health, access to medicines & ethics in clinical research, and most recently, on COVID 19 and its impact on the marginalised. Currently, she is part of the Expert Committee set up by National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to assess the impact of C0VID-I9 pandemic on human rights and its future response.

Malini Ghose

Malini is one of the founder members of Nirantar. She has worked in the field of education and women’s rights for nearly 30 years in various capacities – as a grassroots practitioner, trainer, material and curriculum developer, researcher, and activist. She has helped design and implement various innovative education programmes for women, and reviewed and provided technical inputs to government and NGO interventions on Right to Education and in gender and education. She was a member of the National Resource Group (NRG) for the Mahila Samakhya programme and was part of NCERT’s textbook Writing Committee for Political and Social Life and Political Science Textbooks from 2005-2008. Her articles have been published in the Economic and Political Weekly, The International Review of Education and Gender and Development Journal. She is presently completing her PhD at the University of Goettingen, Germany.

THE INTERN ROLL Of HONOUR

The Third Eye Internship Programme offers a ringside view to developing art, writing and pedagogy with a feminist lens. We have a minimum three-month commitment criteria, and welcome folx at any stage of life and education.

Our Champion Interns:

Srija U, Aarya Pathak, Namrata Mishra, Nangsel Sherpa, Achal Dodia, Chaitali Pant, Anisha, Astha Bamba, Juhi Jotwani, Almina Khatoon.

हिंदी