Neha Misra

Biography

Neha Misra नेहा मिश्रा (she/her) is a contemporary eco-folk artist, poet, and an award-winning climate justice advocate. Misra’s feminist-Earth-wisdom-centered interdisciplinary studio embodies the transformative power of art to build bridges between private, collective, planetary healing and liberation. Misra’s creative practice centers her Global Majority lineage as a first-generation, multi-lingual immigrant woman from New Delhi, India, who calls a solar-powered community in the Washington metro region her adopted home.

She has been honored as a Presidential Leadership Scholar, and as a Regenerative Artivist by the Design Science Studio—a partnership of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and habRitual for leading planet conscious artists. Misra is a 2022 fellow of the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis, an initiative of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the OpEd Project, and Ann MacDougal, to change who writes history. She serves as the inaugural Global Ambassador for the nonprofit Remote Energy, which is dedicated to making the solar photovoltaic field more inclusive for BIPOC communities, especially women of color.

Artist statement

I am a contemporary eco-folk artist, poet, and award-winning climate justice advocate. My Mother Earth wisdom centered interdisciplinary studio builds bridges between our private, collective, and planetary healing. As a climate artivist, I use the transformative power of art to inspire dialogue and action that fosters the shared health of people and planet. Connecting the fractal connections between our micro and macro wellbeing is a thread that runs through the entire body of my art making, being, and sharing. My creative practice is rooted in eco-folk art traditions, sacred geometry, and spiritual ecology of my South Asian heritage combined with my lived experiences as a brown climate leader and a first generation Indian-American immigrant woman. By reclaiming decolonized mythologies for transformational worldbuilding, I re-center indigenous wisdom that is essential for a co-creating a sustainable world.

In a fragmented world, I foster courageous possibilities of wholeness by embracing east and west, physical and metaphysical, complex and simple, ancient and future. This nurtures catharsis by expanding our ability to behold the paradox of joyful wonder and profound grief for the state of our tiny blue planet. Through this renewed power of imagination, I weave regenerative ways of belonging in solidarity with local and global communities.

Past Exhibition

new.now. (2024)

February 10–March 16, 2024

Hamiltonian Artists’ distinguished 2023–25 fellows Ali Kaeini, Neha Misra, Hien Kat Nguyen, and Kat Thompson recontextualize cultural, religious, and political symbols and signifiers.