Nandini Nessa, born in Carbondale, Illinois in 1982, is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. After shuffling across the American South ‘n Midwest, she found herself in upstate New York, at Vassar College, where she received her B.A. in Women’s Studies in 2004. Her career in youth development (arts-in-education) started with Make the Road NY, where she produced dope youth directed plays with the Bushwick Youth Theatre Collective, and joined the WOW Cafe Theatre Collective in the Lower East Side. Her play Nayana’s Passing, premiered at the 2005 Dixon Place HOT! Festival, and went onto the Artists of Tomorrow Festival at the West End Theatre.  In 2006, she was awarded the year-long Clinton Fellowship for Service to India, giving her the chance to work with  Pravah, a youth development organization.  She pursued her MFA in Fiction at Brooklyn College upon her return to the States.  Her fiction has been published in the Dash Literary Journal. She is working  on her first novel, Bright Lines.