Bidisha Banerjee is a storyteller, speaker, and embodied leadership coach based in Oakland, occupied Chochenyo-Ohlone land. Her first book, Superhuman River: A Biography of the Ganga, is a multi-strand narrative about following India’s dirty, sacred river from source to sea. Published by Aleph Books (New Delhi) in 2020 and was supported by the Middlebury Environmental Journalism Fellowship and residencies at Hedgebrook and the Mesa Refuge. Photos associated with the book were exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Raised between Kolkata, India and Lawrence, Kansas, Bidisha is committed to hearing and telling stories about gender, sexuality, and social justice that support cultures to evolve.
She is committed to evoking the sense of wisdom, joy and possibility she encountered in her meetings with His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama.
As a first-generation low-income woman of color immigrant at Yale, she did her best to fake it until she made it…until she realized that her best self doesn’t fake it.
As an undergraduate, she received Yale’s Willetts Prize and Bergen Memorial Prize for her short fiction and co-directed Phucchi (a documentary short about a Nepali prostitute who escaped sex trafficking). QPIRG-McGill funded her to co-direct End the Live-In Caregiver Program! She served as a production assistant for Marie Botie and Malcolm Guy’s Ships of Shame (Productions MultiMonde, Montreal).
She has written over 100 pieces for Slate Magazine, that range in subject from science and technology policy to culture to media. She has also written for Triple Canopy, Washington City Paper, Reason, and the Stanford Journal of Law, Science and Policy. Her work was featured in a textbook called Climate Change and the Law.
While completing her Masters in Social Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, she convened interdisciplinary workshops on fast-track responses to climate change through the Yale Climate and Energy Institute, and received the Sabin Sustainable Venture Prize for Encendia Biochar, a clean technology start-up she co-founded. She is also a co-founder of the Geoengineering Scenarios Group.
She spent a year as an environmental educator in rural India through Indicorps, and is a Donella Meadows Fellow of the Balaton Group in Hungary.