Nayantara Sen is a first generation Bengali immigrant, a trilingual storyteller and fiction writer, a narrative and cultural strategist, and a political educator. She is the Director of Field and Funder Learning at the Pop Culture Collaborative, and the Lead Designer and Narrative Strategist for the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy at Race Forward. At the Collaborative, she supports learning immersions, capacity building and partnerships across a broad field and funder learning portfolio, advises on narrative Labs and cohorts, and incubates two emerging projects – Culture Change U (a narrative and cultural training and learning institute) and Project Azaadi (a national network of narrative and cultural strategists and practitioners).  

Nayantara has worked for over 15 years at the intersections of narrative, arts and culture, immigration, racial and gender justice, systems change, movement strategies and innovation. She was previously the Director of Narrative and Cultural Strategies at RaceForward. She is author of Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity: A Toolbox, the widely taught Cultural Strategy Primer, and more recently, Stories for Change with Storyline Partners, which equips pop culture for social change professionals with tools to integrate equity practices into content development, production and post-production. 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.  

Nayantara has trained with the Interaction Institute for Social Change and Race Forward. She currently serves on design and advisory boards for the Constellations Fund at the Center for Cultural Power, the New York City Narrative Power Network for Health and Racial Equity, and South Asian SOAR (Survivors and Organizations in Alliance Rising). She has an M.A in Postcolonial and Diasporic Literature and Creative Fiction Writing from New York University. She lives in the Bay Area and enjoys cooking, hiking, reading poetry and dancing.