Shivani Dasmahapatra is a public policy and communications specialist with over three decades of diverse experience — spanning consulting for Members of Parliament, corporate enterprises, and non-profits to journalism, editing, photography, and social media strategy.

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Born into a family with three generations in the Indian Army, she has a deep-rooted interest in Indian military history and specializes in Defence & Veteran Affairs policy matters. As the Founder Trustee of Lest We Forget India Foundation, she supports families of Armed Forces personnel and chronicles stories of service and sacrifice to preserve India’s military legacy.

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She recently co-edited In Her Defence: Ten Landmark Judgments on Women in the Armed Forces (Penguin, 2024), an anthology of essays and commentaries on constitutional court decisions in India that brought about significant change for women in uniform. She is currently immersed in research for her next book.

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Shivani also serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Forces Law Review, the first-ever international journal of law — an academic collaboration between the National Institute of Military Justice, Washington DC, USA, and the Centre for Constitution & Public Policy, UILS, Panjab University, Chandigarh.

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A seasoned writer and editor, she has worked with India Today newsmagazine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and several national publications.

 

She continues to consult on communications strategy, content development, and knowledge products for organizations across sectors.

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Art & Creative Practice

Alongside her policy and writing work, Shivani is a mixed-media artist whose visual language grows from a lifelong engagement with photography, nature, and quiet observation.

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Her practice moves fluidly between the poetic and the tactile. Working from her own photographs of botanicals, birds, equines, architectural spaces, and light-drenched landscapes, she transforms source imagery into layered artworks that blur the boundary between photograph and painting.

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Through digital compositing, pigment printing, and hand-finished detail, Shivani constructs images that carry stillness and luminosity in equal measure. Some works are restrained and meditative; others unfold with a sense of lush, ceremonial presence — yet always anchored in balance rather than excess.

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Her portfolio spans several interconnected bodies of work — from faceless human forms that serve as vessels of emotion and inner life, to compositions shaped by ink traditions and architectural rhythms that privilege space, breath, and contemplation. Recurring studies of horses, birds, and flora act as symbolic presences, embodying movement and pause, freedom and fragility, memory and time.

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Influenced by Neo-Baroque atmosphere, Romantic Naturalism, and Eastern philosophies of impermanence, her work often stages a dialogue between beauty and transience. Antique interiors, weathered surfaces, open landscapes, and dreamlike botanicals become quiet theatres where nature and emotion gently intersect.

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Her compositions invite pause: flowers suspended in air, a horse emerging at dusk, birds held mid-breath, human forms reduced to gesture rather than identity. These works are not narratives but moments — meditations on how light, texture, and time shape feeling.

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For Shivani, art flows seamlessly between image-making, writing, and the natural world. It is a lived, attentive practice — one that bridges the poetic and the contemplative, offering a timeless conversation between presence and absence, nature and imagination.

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Advocacy & Personal Life

Outside of work, Shivani is a strong advocate for child education, women’s empowerment, and animal welfare, and is a patron of the Foundation for Media Professionals.

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She divides her time between city life and the Himalayan hills, where she farms, paints, and spends time with her family and her beloved Basset Hound.