Vandana Menon

Vandana is a non-fiction filmmaker based in Tezpur, Assam. With Debashish Nandi, she started The River Project, a collective of people living along the Brahmaputra in Assam and the Teesta in Sikkim. Together, they create archives that weave cultural memory, lived experience and climate stories into a people's biography of rivers, co-created by humans and the rivers themselves. For Vandana, rivers are more than sources of water. They are sentient beings that shape our cultures, our histories and the way we understand the world, and coexistence begins when many voices and ways of knowing are heard. 

Through her Champions project, Vandana will work with riverside communities to create an alternative environmental history of the Siang, Dibang, Luit and Teesta rivers. Using storytelling across disciplines, the project will link cultural histories with today's threatened landscapes and climate stories. Her co-creators include fishing village elders from Kolibari fishing village in Tezpur, semi-nomadic buffalo herders living in khutis (cattle camps) on temporary sandbanks along the Assam–Arunachal Pradesh border, and the Indigenous Lepchas of Dzongu in North Sikkim. The project will include a year-long arts education program for children aged 8 to 15 in Kolibari, one of the oldest fishing villages in the heart of Tezpur, where a longstanding fishing tradition is fading, culminating in a public exhibition. Pushing back against what writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story”, Vandana's work seeks narrative justice by changing whose voices are amplified and trusted in the stories we tell about rivers and about each other.