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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

Art & Creative Practice

Alongside her policy and writing work, Shivani is a mixed-media artist whose visual language emerges from a lifelong engagement with photography and the natural world.

​

Her practice moves fluidly between the poetic and the tactile — transforming her original photographs of botanicals, birds, equines, and light-drenched landscapes into large-scale artworks that blur the boundary between painting and photograph.

 

Through digital layering, pigment printing, and hand-finished detail, she constructs images that carry the quiet tension of still life and the luminosity of living memory.

Rooted in the aesthetics of Neo-Baroque and Romantic Naturalism, her work often stages a dialogue between beauty and transience — faded grandeur and wild growth, the seen and the remembered. Antique interiors, peeling walls, and dreamlike botanicals become backdrops where nature and emotion intertwine.

 

Her compositions invite pause: flowers suspended in air, a horse at dusk in a field lit by forgotten light, birds poised among forests of larger-than-life flora and fauna. They are meditations on impermanence and beauty — on how light, texture, and time together create feeling.

​

For Shivani, art is not confined to a medium but flows seamlessly between writing, image-making, and the natural world — a lived practice of curiosity, discipline, and wonder. Her work forms an immersive continuum of fine art that bridges the poetic and the contemplative, carrying forward a timeless dialogue between nature and the imagination.

​

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.

​

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.