Nandini is a visual storyteller, illustrator, and activist based in Kolkata, India. They work across a wide range of mediums, from digital illustration to oil and acrylic painting, embroidery, sculpture, and murals. But no matter the medium, their work keeps circling back to the same questions. What does queer intimacy look like at home? What did queer history feel like before it was erased or written out? And how do feminist food traditions quietly carry forms of resistance passed down through generations? Their paintings are full of colour, lush backgrounds, and patterns pulled from Bengal's textile traditions, a visual language shaped as much by years of feminist organising.
Nandini cofounded Amra Odbhut, a queer art collective in Kolkata, where they served as co director and helped curate over thirty performances and exhibitions over six years. They also helped conceptualise and lead Imagining Utopias, a South Asian queer history archiving project supported by the Prince Claus Fund. Their mural celebrating Kolkata's transmasculine community stretches a hundred feet and is among the first of its kind in South Asia. Other murals include a piece co painted at the UN Climate Change Conference with Fearless Collective, and a work imagining a decolonised history of mental health at the Museum of Mental Health in Chennai.
Their work has been shown at India Habitat Centre in Delhi, Ort Gallery in Birmingham, and Autograph ABP in London, and was featured at the Women's Pavilion during UN COP28. They have also collaborated with organisations including Frida Fund, UAF Africa, Oxfam, and Equality Fund.