Nayantara Sen

Part of the About the 2022 Guest Editors Series

Grantmakers in the Arts

Nayantara Sen is a Bengali immigrant, a trilingual storyteller and fiction writer, a narrative and cultural strategist, and a social justice educator. She is the Director of Field and Funder Learning at the Pop Culture Collaborative, the Lead Designer and Narrative Strategist for the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy, and the previous Director of Narrative and Cultural Strategies at Race Forward. 

For the last 15 years, Nayantara has worked at the intersections of arts and culture, narrative and story-based strategy, racial and gender justice, immigration, movement strategies and equity-building for arts institutions. Nayantara is a recovering arts administrator who has previously held staff, curatorial and consulting roles in museums, film festivals, theatre and community-based arts organizations. Her artistic background is in oral history, creative fiction writing and Theatre of Oppressed. 

She was the Lead Designer of the NYC Racial Equity in the Arts Innovation Lab, which equipped 60 NYC arts-producing organizations and museums with strategies for racial and cultural justice. She is the author of Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity: A Toolbox for Arts and Cultural Organizations, the widely taught Cultural Strategy Primer, and the Storyline Partners’ Stories for Change toolkit. At the Pop Culture Collaborative, Nayantara works closely with arts and social justice philanthropy to advance learning and action on narrative strategies. She also partners with a wide range of arts organizations such as the Constellations Fund at the Center for Cultural Power, Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts-NY, and the San Jose Museum of Art.