Nandana Dev Sen is an award-winning actor, writer, and child-rights activist. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University (where she won the Detur Book Prize, as well as the John Harvard Scholarship and Elizabeth Agassiz Award each year) and studying filmmaking at the USC School of Cinema-Television, Nandana worked as a literary editor, a screenwriter, a poetry translator, a child-protection advocate, and as Princess Jasmine in Disneyland.
Nandana grew up in India, England, and America, and has acted in over 20 feature films from all three continents (and in multiple languages). She is Artist Ambassador for Save the Children India, Author Advocate for Girls' Education for Room to Read, and a Director of the Women's Refugee Commission, New York, where she chairs the Program and Advocacy Committee.
Nandana is the author of six children's books, In My Heart (Penguin Random House, 2019), The Monkey Who Wanted to Fly (Italian: La scimmietta che voleva volare, Fetrinelli Kids, 2018), Talky Tumble of Jumble Farm (Penguin Random House, 2017), Not Yet! (Tulika Books, 2017), Kangaroo Kisses (Otter-Barry Books, 2016), and Mambi and the Forest Fire (Puffin, 2016), as well as Youthquake, a fiction series for young adults (published in The Wire, The Telegraph, and Youth Ki Awaaz).
Nandana‘s first book Kangaroo Kisses was selected by 320+ UK nurseries as a “Book of Excellence”, and her interactive workshops have been loved by more than 30,000 young people, in person, across the world. She frequently writes for newspapers and journals, and has edited and co-authored a bilingual book of her translations of her mother Nabaneeta Dev Sen's Bengali poetry, Make Up Your Mind. Her latest book, Acrobat, a collection of poems by Nabaneeta Dev Sen translated by Nandana, published internationally by Archipelago Books and released in India by Juggernaut, has won unanimously great reviews, and ringing endorsements from top writers (including Amitav Ghosh, Gloria Steinem, Anita Desai, Forrest Gander and Siddhartha Mukherjee).
As an ambassador and advocate, Nandana has worked closely with children and grown-ups with prominent organizations such as UNICEF, National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Terre des hommes Foundation, RAHI (India's first organization for survivors of child sexual abuse), Apne Aap (ends sex-trafficking by providing education and preventing intergenerational prostitution), and Operation Smile (transforms lives of children with cranio-facial deformities).
The winner of several Best Actress awards (including the TeleCine and Kalakar Awards), academic and writing prizes (most recently, the Wingword Poetry Prize), as well as honors for her advocacy work (such as the Last-Girl Champion Award for lifetime achievement in child protection), Nandana has served on numerous child-rights commissions and juries of global film festivals and international literary prizes (including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature).
Nandana lives in New York, London, and Kolkata, and loves to eat, bike, rhyme, dance, and argue.
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