Biography

I am an Indian South African interdisciplinary artist, educator and practitioner-researcher based in Northern Ireland. Across more than 26 years, my work has connected artistic practice, youth participation, ecological learning, embodied wellbeing, technology and collective change with more than 19,500 people — primarily underserved young people — across 13 countries. I founded eduSOIL CIC to nurture experiences that connect hearts, heads and hands, and I lead Design for Change relationships across Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sudan.

My creative practice moves between performance, poetry, music, photography, visual and participatory art. My artistic voice has also grown through my lived experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse within my family and domestic violence. For years, shame, silence and concern for those around me shaped what I felt able to share. In 2018, I publicly disclosed part of my story through #MeTooWhenIWasAChild. Through writing, painting, music, self-portraiture and performance, I began making visible experiences that are so often silenced. Creative expression has been part of my own healing, and a way of connecting with other survivors, challenging stigma and advocating for the prevention of violence against women and girls.

Works such as The Vagina in the Room, Unashamed and My Body, All Mine carry this personal testimony into artistic encounter. I share these experiences on my own terms, with attention to dignity, consent and the wellbeing of audiences and participants. Alongside this survivor-led artivism, my educational, community and research work explores how presence, imagination, relationship and action can support personal and collective change.

My life brings together multiple professions, creative expressions and evolving roles, shaped by movement between places, collaboration across disciplines and a continuing enquiry into self, oneness and earth.