BIO
Bidisha is an embodied leadership coach. She is the author of Superhuman River: Stories of the Ganga. She believes that the more attuned we are to the sensations and aliveness in our bodies, the more we will be able to protect our rivers and our wildlife.
For five years, Bidisha served as a program and founding curriculum director for the Dalai Lama Fellowship, which empowered millennials addressing community needs at the intersection of justice, peace and ecology from more than 30 countries. She co-created a coaching program focused on self, collaboration across differences, and designing ethical systems.
In conjunction with her team, she presented about this work to His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, and secured funding from him — and from several foundations.
She was featured in this micro-documentary, and at a panel at the 2013 Festival of Faiths in Louisville, KY.
Check out her post about "The Power of Secular Sangha."
Harvard Divinity School invited her to join its cohort of 80 spiritual innovators who are community leaders. And the Association for Contemplative Mind in Society for invited her to speak about Radicalizing Contemplative Education.
The Future of Ecology Think Tank at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center exhibited photographs from her journey along the Ganga in 2016.
Yale’s Tropical Resources Institute, The Middlebury Environmental Journalism Fellowship, Triple Canopy, Hedgebrook, the Mesa Refuge, and the Yerba Buena Arts Center's Future Soul Think Tank supported her work.
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! And 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.
She is certified as a somatic coach by the Strozzi Institute, and at the PCC (750 hour) level by the International Coach Federation.