Tell us about you
Who is your Spark? My mother, Rakhee Sajnani, inspired three daughters to be independent thinkers and compassionate, creative women. She has an insatiable thirst for discovery and new learning, a playful and generous heart, and creates communities wherever she travels.
What are you most known for? Designing and facilitating innovative and effective learning communities. Inspiring reflection, imagination, analysis, and transformation through collective storytelling, improvisation, and performance.
Name an achievement you are proud of: Cultivating a global garden of relationships with creative social innovators. This is not an achievement I can take sole credit for because sustaining relationships requires mutual effort but I am proud to be in the company of such creative people.
When I was a girl... I would gather my friends into my living room, tell stories, form air bands, make costumes and skits, go on scavenger hunts, ride horseback and, my all time favourites, play ‘let’s design a course’ and ‘who wants to facilitate?”
What is your hope or dream for the next generation of girls? I want our next generation of girls and young women to indulge discovery and creativity. I want girls and young women to be able to realize the fullness of their potential in any path they should create or choose without fear of being silenced, marginalized, or diminished. My hope for our next generation of girls is that they are not persecuted because of who they are, what they do, or whom they love. I want our next generation of children to have inspiring mentors, loving mothers and/or fathers, and loyal friends so that they may be the same to those that follow.
BIO
Nisha Sajnani, PhD, RDT is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and registered drama therapist. She is the director of Creative Alternatives which is, at once, a network of inspired social innovators committed to deepening the relationship between creativity and interdependence and a platform from which Nisha has designed and facilitated learning environments examining a broad range of social policy issues (racism, poverty, immigration, youth engagement, social cohesion, gender equity, violence prevention, governance). Nisha has had the pleasure of facilitating the annual retreat as well as training in popular education for members of the Girls Action Foundation over the past eight years.
Nisha has extensive experience with arts-based and collaborative approaches to group learning and inquiry and also brings expertise in trauma and its effects on human systems. For the past four years, Creative Alternatives has been a project partner in a ground breaking Oral History project in Montreal entitled: Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations.
Nisha is also the director of the program in Drama Therapy, Community Health and Prevention at the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven, CT. She coordinates an innovative program called Animating Learning by Integrating and Validating Experience (A.L.I.V.E) which is a preventative approach to facilitating student engagement that draws upon principles from popular education and drama therapy.
She is on faculty at the Institutes for the Arts in Psychotherapy (NYC) and at New York University where she teaches a course on Arts-Based Research. Nisha is also on faculty at Yale University where she teaches a course on Applied Theatre, Trauma, and Cultural Intervention. She is currently affiliated with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma (Global Mental Health Trauma and Recovery Program). Nisha is the President-Elect of the National Association for Drama Therapy.
