Anasuya Sengupta

Anasuya Sengupta is the Senior Director of Grantmaking for Wikimedia Foundation. Previous to that she was Regional Director for Asia and Oceania at the Global Fund for Women, the world’s largest grant-making organization exclusively for women’s human rights. She spent her childhood in north Karnataka, an arid and resource-poor region of southern India, and returned here after her undergraduate degree in Economics (Honors) from Delhi University.

She served as a Program Officer at Samuha, an organization working with village women on issues of livelihoods security. From 2001 to 2007, Anasuya headed a UNICEF (India) partnership with the Karnataka State Police, and was responsible for designing and implementing a state wide system of police response to issues of violence against women and children. Over the same period, she served as an Associate with Gender at Work, an international knowledge network for gender equality, and advised the Young Women and Leadership/Young Feminist Activism Program of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID).

She is actively involved with Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN), a global South network of women's activists, working across Asia-Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Anasuya founded the White Ribbon Campaign for Peace (India), and has been part of national and regional networks against religious and cultural fundamentalisms.

She co-edited and contributed to Defending Our Dreams: Global Feminist Voices for a New Generation (AWID and Zed Books, 2006), arguably the first international anthology of young feminist analyses. Anasuya holds an M.Phil in Development Studies, as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and is currently completing her doctoral dissertation in Politics from Oxford. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. She speaks English, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam, and is challenged by yoga, while sustained by poetry, theatre and music.

Anasuya has experience with TV, radio, print and online media, while based in India.