by Neha Misra

Neha Misra, Technology is Innocent—or is it?, Acrylic, Gouache, Ink, Dreams, Cold Press Paper, 24 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

The World Below the Brine

Neha Misra नेहा मिश्रा | MaY 2025 | Issue 45

My Mother Earth wisdom-centered interdisciplinary studio embodies the transformative power of art to build bridges between our private, collective, and planetary healing. As a climate artivist, I inspire contemplation, dialogue and action to foster the shared health of people and planet. My practice reveals fractal connections between our micro and macro wellbeing while celebrating art’s essential role in both resistance and creation needed for climate just solutions. Through this renewed power of imagination, I weave regenerative ways of belonging that honor relationships of mutuality.

My process is rooted in feminist eco-folk art traditions, sacred geometry, and spiritual ecology of my South Asian cultural heritage. These interact with my lived experiences as a brown climate leader and an immigrant woman who became a United States citizen during the Covid-19 pandemic exile. I honor, re-member and re-center multi-lingual knowledge we need for a sustainable world. My mother tongue Hindi, my ancestral tongue Sanskrit, and my colonial tongue English come together in this journey of transformational worldbuilding. By reclaiming decolonized mythologies, I re-center indigenous wisdom for co-creating a sustainable world.

In a fragmented world, I deepen courageous possibilities of wholeness that transcend false binary choices of east vs west, physical vs metaphysical, past vs future, local vs. global. This becomes a portal of witnessing and being witnessed.

I combine this with an interest in neuroscience to balance the left brain, which dominates in the modern external world, with the right brain—the spiritual and creative connection within and without. This nurtures catharsis by expanding our ability to behold the paradox of joyful wonder and profound grief for our shared blue planet.

Neha Misra, *Baobab Dreams of a Peacock,* Acrylic, Ink, Dreams, Cold Press Paper, 24 in by 18 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

Neha Misra, *The Peace Tree: Shanti Mantra Earth Meditations,* Acrylic, Ink, Dreams, Cold Press Paper, 24 in by 18 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Neha Misra नेहा मिश्रा (she/her) is an award-winning contemporary eco-folk artist, poet, and climate justice advocate. Her Mother Earth wisdom centered interdisciplinary studio embodies the transformative power of art to build bridges between private, collective, planetary healing and justice. Neha's practice is rooted in her Global Majority lineage as a first-generation, multi-lingual immigrant woman from New Delhi, India, who calls a borderline solar community in the Washington, DC metro her beloved adopted home. She is a recipient of Nootana Washington DC’s 2024 “Preronadayini/Inspiration Giver” Distinguished Creative Leadership Award and North Carolina Climate Justice Collective’s 2024 TapRoot Artist Residency. Neha is 2023-2025 Hamiltonian Artists Fellow and 2022 Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis — an initiative of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the OpEd Project to change who writes history.