SAADA

Bio
Dhanya Addanki (she/her) is a journalist, editor, and oral historian. She has spent most of her career working in the human rights, religion, and political journalism space. Dhanya’s project uncovers the stories of Dalit people – specifically Dalit women – in the U.S. This project’s main goals are to unearth the history of the people in this community, people who have often not had the privilege to know their past, and to showcase their nuance, dignity, and power. Because of her strong belief that communities cannot heal from historic, intergenerational trauma without knowing their history, with this project, Dhanya hopes to catalyze collective healing and liberation through story. Dhanya was born in South India and raised in South Texas.

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Gaiutra Bahadur (she/her) is a Guyanese-American writer and author of Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture in the West Indies shortlisted for Britain's Orwell Prize for artful political writing. Her work as a journalist, essayist, and creative writer has appeared in a wide range of anthologies, magazines, and newspapers across the globe, including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Guardian, History Today, The Griffith Review, The Boston Review and Dissent. Gaiutra teaches journalism as an assistant professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University-Newark. For her project, she will gather stories and material objects that bear witness to the tales and textures of departures and arrivals for Guyanese immigrants in the New York metro area.

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Mustafa Saifuddin helped curate the Archive of Queer Brown Feelings (saada.org/qof), featuring oral histories and participatory storytelling from queer and trans south Asians as part of their archival fellowship with SAADA from 2019-2020. Their collection explored stories of inspiration, resistance and resilience, and experimented with creative and authentic ways of storytelling hoping to allow for community-building while maintaining privacy and resisting surveillance. Mustafa's family is from India, and they were born in Saudi Arabia before growing up in Texas.

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Efadul Huq is a poet, urban planner, multimedia storyteller dedicated to preserving queer community stories, and is currently completing his doctoral research on socially-just urban resilience in cities of the global south. Efad is the co-founder of Queer Archive of the Bengal Delta, which archives memories of queer social and political lives in the region and produces situated analysis through articles, reports, and videos. Efad’s project aims to collect stories and material artifacts that together speak to the experiences of Bangladeshi queer migrants in the U.S. The project hopes to capture the patterns of loss, displacement, nostalgia, questioning identities and making homes out of refuge and temporariness within this community. There is rare, if any, representation of queer Bangladeshi migrants in the existing South Asian American narratives. Through archiving and sharing these stories, the project hopes to promote more inclusive migrant narratives in the mainstream discourse.

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Savannah Kumar (she/they) is a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and a community artist. Savannah works to reimagine justice with those who have directly experienced incarceration and state violence. Savannah's project for SAADA involves bearing witness to South Asian Americans whose lives have been impacted by incarceration in jails, prisons, juvenile detention centers, and immigration detention centers. Savannah will collect these intergenerational narratives and offer them back to the community to facilitate healing, welcoming, and solidarity.

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Nikhil D. Patil, MPH (he/him) is a global health researcher working at the intersection of infectious diseases, data, technology, and design. A former Peace Corps Volunteer Volunteer (Togo ‘08-’10), he has spent his career advocating for women, children, and other marginalized populations on a wide range of health topics including immunizations, Ebola response, clean water, medical device design, and health service delivery. As an avid reader of public health history and an aspiring queer writer, he was inspired to concentrate his work as a 2020 SAADA Archival Creators Fellow on the impact of HIV and AIDS within the South Asian American community. Nikhil lives in Atlanta with his husband Ryan and their two cats, Maize & Nash.

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Omme-Salma Rahemtullah (she/her) is dedicated to community-informed media programmer, having worked in independent film exhibition and community radio, bringing to the screens and airwaves stories from communities often sidelined in mainstream media spaces. She currently works as a policy consultant in Food Advocacy and Access. Born in Tanzania and raised in Toronto, Omme is a recent transplant to the American south (Columbia, SC). Her SAADA fellowship project focused on the migration of Ugandan Asian refugees to the South Carolina upstate in 1972, where they were the first refugee resettlement program in the state, and opened the first Ismaili Jamatkhana in the U.S. in the town of Spartanburg. With this project, she wants to highlight and ensure that the narratives of refugees, Muslims and Asians from Africa are part of the stories we tell of South Asians in America.

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Nargis Hakim Rahman (she/her) is a Bangladeshi American Muslim journalist from Metro Detroit. She works as a reporter for WDET, Detroit’s NPR Station. Nargis graduated from Wayne State University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and a psychology minor. She is passionate about community journalism and hopes to give American Muslims and minorities a voice in the press. Her work has appeared in NPR, Huffington Post, Haute Hijab, Eater, The Muslim Observer, Brown Girl Magazine and more. Nargis's project focuses on documenting Detroit's Bangladeshi women entrepreneurs who have found creative ways to own businesses while upholding and celebrating culture and traditions to contribute to Detroit's socioeconomic development in the region.

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Dadasaheb Tandale (he/him) is an advocate for social justice and is currently a Ph.D. student at the School of Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is passionate about working for socio-economic and political inclusion of marginalized communities; particularly at the intersections of health rights, land rights, education, and climate justice for Dalit and Tribal populations in India. He has worked extensively in research, advocacy, communications, project management, and operations with government, partner agencies and communities. Dadasaheb aims to build an oral history project of the Ambedkarite movement in the U.S. Through this project, he intends to explore the sense of adopted identity as an Ambedkarite, various forms of discrimination faced and the forms of resistance adopted by the members of the community within the oppressive caste dynamics in the U.S. Being an Ambedkarite himself, he intends to bring an alternate cultural narrative of the community to the forefront which demonstrates the path of annihilation of caste.

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Kartik Amarnath (he/him) is a 'third culture kid' of an Indo-Malaysian mother and Ilankai (Sri Lankan) Tamil father who grew up across four countries. He is currently based in Brooklyn, NY and works remotely as the Policy Specialist for PUSH Buffalo. He has professional and academic backgrounds in public health, environmental justice, and critical urban studies. Through the Fulbright Program, he studied environmental gentrification in his mother’s Indo-Malaysian childhood neighborhood of Brickfields. His writing on public health, climate change, and environmental justice has been published in Environmental Health News, The Guardian, Naked Capitalism, and academic journals in law and medicine. His fellowship project documents the multigenerational legacy of Ilankai Tamil feminist dissent. Many Tamil dissidents fled into hiding or were assassinated for being perceived as threats by warring factions. But elements of this dissident legacy have found their way to, or were influenced by, the US. This history demonstrates alternatives to mainstream narratives of diaspora Tamils as docile model minorities or ethnonationalists on the 'wrong side' of the War on Terrorism. Kartik’s project began the same year as the 40th anniversary of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library and its archive – a cataclysm which helped spark the Sri Lankan Civil War. By documenting his community’s legacy of feminist resistance, he hopes to reclaim the archive from its traumatic associations, helping Tamils take a step towards collective healing in the afterlife of war.

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Michael A. Henry (he/him) is a Jamaican-American financial services professional with a B.A. in International Business & Management from Dickinson College and a Masters of Business Administration from Pepperdine University with a focus on Socially, Environmentally, and Ethically Responsible Business Strategy. Michael is passionate about diversity & inclusion, representation for underrepresented groups, public history, and transnational migration – having studied transnational migration from Mexico to Pennsylvania while at Dickinson College. As a native New Yorker, of Indo-Jamaican heritage, Michael recently relocated to South Florida. He is also passionate about his rich Indo-Jamaican heritage which often goes unmentioned in narratives about the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. Michael’s project will collect migration stories and archival images of items such as family photos, musical traditions, and religious affiliations to document the representations of identity, culture, and experiences of Indo-Jamaicans in South Florida. This project hopes to broaden the discourse around the South Asian American diaspora to provide representation for minority subgroups.

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Sandhya Jha (they/them) is an organizer, activist, Christian pastor and founder of the Oakland Peace Center in Oakland, CA. Sandhya works as an anti-oppression/Diversity-Equity-Inclusion consultant and is currently working on a book about how connecting with our ancestors can equip us for the work of dismantling white supremacy. Sandhya's father is from West Bengal, India and their mother is from Scotland. Sandhya's engagement with workers' rights led them to their fellowship project with SAADA this year: documenting the stories of South Asian workers who have engaged with labor organizing in the United States. Many young South Asian Americans don't know that there have been South Asian Americans engaged in union organizing from hotels to schools to transit workers; this project will seek to capture those stories in their fullness and complexity.

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Sharmeen Mehri (she/her) is a Zoroastrian from Karachi, Pakistan, currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation in the English department at the University at Buffalo. She teaches rhetoric and writing courses at the university. Her research focuses on postcolonial literature with an interdisciplinary focus on memory work and archival studies. Sharmeen’s SAADA oral history project, Memories We Carry, seeks to examine and preserve the migration experiences of Zoroastrian South Asians to the United States. With a specific focus on the narrative of assimilation and dissimilation, these oral history interviews document how Zoroastrians preserve or adapt their cultural expressions within the context of the broader American immigrant experience. In addition, this project highlights voices in the Zoroastrian community who have yet to be represented fully in their localities in the US and abroad, such as, Iranian Zoroastrians from South Asia and LGBTQ Zoroastrians.

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Zainab Mohsini (she/her) is an Afghan refugee, community organizer, social justice advocate and former Congressional candidate. As a working-class woman, Zainab has held a variety of jobs throughout her life, ranging from being a restaurant server, retail employee, AmeriCorps service member, political canvasser, Dari interpreter, and currently a legal coordinator at a reproductive justice non-profit. Zainab is passionate about centering the voices of those who are the most marginalized. She has organized protests to advocate for oppressed communities including to increase protections for the incoming Afghan refugees. Zainab’s SAADA project focuses on telling the stories of Afghan women in their own perspectives to showcase their diversity, resilience, and humanity. In the popular narrative Afghan women are either fetishized like Sharbat Gula, whose beauty graces the cover of National Geographic, or are objectified as “victims” whose imperialistic rescue justifies a two trillion-dollar, decades long war. The stories of Afghan women are too often told by white people who use them as symbols to justify their own geopolitical agenda. This project will demonstrate that Afghan women are often the breadwinners and leaders in their families and communities with complex lived experiences and stories.

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Luna Ranjit (she/her) is an organizer and a writer committed to lifting up silenced stories. She writes across and between boundaries of personal and political, state and society, US and Nepal, poetry and prose. She co-founded and led Adhikaar, a Queens-based organization building power of new immigrant communities, and in 2014, she helped create the New York Healthy Nail Salons Coalition. The Nepali community in the U.S. has grown exponentially in the past two decades but remains practically invisible in the mainstream, including South Asian spaces. Even when Nepalis are included, it is often caste-privileged Khas individuals who end up representing the entire community. For her SAADA project, Luna worked with Dalit, Janjati, and Madhesi communities in Nepali diaspora to document stories of people who have been marginalized within the Nepali spaces because of their caste and/or ethnicity.

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Joymala Hajra (she/her) is a New York native with Bangladeshi roots. She has worked in the fashion industry as a textile artist for over two decades. Her passions include vintage textiles, gendered memory, and sartorial studies. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and two shih-tzus. Joymala's project will focus on Bangladeshi women-led mutual aid efforts serving the Bangladeshi community of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021.

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Sanjana Nigam (she/her) is a native New Yorker and Indian-American-Canadian journalist. She graduated with a Masters from Columbia Journalism School in 2020, and currently works at Business Insider and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She is passionate​​ about using her reporting skills to document identity-driven stories across the South Asian diaspora. During the pandemic, well-known South Asian restaurants and storefronts, which had long provided refuge and comfort, had to close their doors, and the loss rippled throughout the community. This inspired Sanjana’s project, which will focus on the stories and histories of first-generation South Asian-owned small businesses across New York City’s five boroughs who lost their means of livelihood in the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through archiving and gathering these first-hand narratives, this project hopes to immortalize first-generation immigrant experiences and the significance of the South Asian community in New York City.

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Roshni Bhupendra Shah (she/her) is a heart-led community connector & compassion-driven nurse dedicated to empowering others to be a catalyst for change. Her curiosity for the history behind our shared humanity and passion for authenticity has served as the foundation for community building across Chicago & India. As a Critical Care nurse on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, the emotional & physical fatigue of facing death and fear head continues to be unpacked. Through the power of establishing safe spaces for creative expression, Roshni continues to collect stories from the frontlines at @southasiansbehindthemask and advocates for the mental well being of service workers. Her project, The Heart of The Hero showcases the unbearingly heavy burden to serve as “heroes”, while suffering from loss, combating stress and striving for survival despite a large gap in mental health & emotional support. She hopes these narratives of the humans behind the mask will provide an opportunity for healing, processing and preserving a picture of the impact this will have for generations to come and how these hardships don’t define, but do shape the legacy South Asian Americans will create.

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Nureena Faruqi (she/her) is a writer, artist, and caregiver advocate from North Carolina. She is an alum of VONA (Voices of our Nations Foundation) and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writer's Lab (IWL). She has had work recently featured in IWL's anthology chapbook, Into the Country of Our Kitchen, Triangle Poetry Twenty-Twenty One and has a forthcoming essay in the Offing. Nureena’s project will revolve around how disabled/chronically ill South Asian Americans have had to create communities via virtual space: transcending tactile physical geographical space. She will document the connections, stories, and reimaginings that occur through these virtual exchanges.

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Pooja Prazid (she/her) is a chemical engineer who works in manufacturing in Louisiana. She was born in Kochi, Kerala and moved to California at the age of three, splitting her childhood between Sunnyvale and Folsom. She studied chemical engineering at UC Berkeley before moving to Chalmette, right outside New Orleans. Her research project will focus on the South Asian American experience in southeast Louisiana. Her project will also explore South Asians feelings of connection and isolation to the South, with respect to Southern culture, history, and value systems compared and in conjunction with their ancestral connections. She also wants to collect stories on how South Asian Americans have contributed to and become involved in the greater New Orleans community.

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Rojika Sharma (she/they) is an organizer, artist and a graduate student of geography at The Ohio State University–within her studies she is working to map and answer questions related to identity and cultural movements. As a former refugee, Rojika has engaged and led projects centered around art, mental health advocacy, and fundraisers to support the refugee and immigrant population in Central Ohio. Rojika's fellowship project will focus on the Bhutanese-Nepali community in Central Ohio, where she will gather stories in connection to land practices, attachment to place, and aspiration of community spaces. She hopes her project will highlight narratives of South Asian refugees living in the midwest and contribute to the larger conversations of South Asian Americans.