Arati Kumar-Rao is a National Geographic Explorer and an independent environmental photographer, writer, and artist who documents ecological degradation. She chronicles South Asia’s changing landscapes and their effect on livelihoods and biodiversity. Her first book, Marginlands: Indian landscapes on the Brink, won the Green Litfest award for book of the year and was shortlisted at the Crossword Book Awards, Tata LitLive, and AttaGalata. The book has been republished by Milkweed Editions in North America, February 2025.

Arati was named in BBC top 100 Influential and Inspiring women from around the world in 2023.  Her work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine, Emergence Magazine, BBC, The Hindu, The Guardian, among other outlets. When not on assignment, she splits her time between the Western Ghats and Bangalore, where she plays a happy mother to three rescued cats.

She is currently on a National Geographic grant to document human migration in India.

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Categories & Topics

Water, Rivers, and the Changing Land:

  • Water, Water Everywhere — But Is There Any to Drink?
  • The Sacred and the Profane: Journeys Through the Ganga Delta
  • Are There Dolphins in the Ganga?
  • When Rivers Remember: Reading the Stories Written in Floodplains

Landscapes, Memory, and the Language of Place:

  • The Danger of Forgetting: How We Lost the Map of Our Own Land
  • The Landscape Lexicon: How the Words We Use Shape the World We Build
  • Margins as Mirrors: What Peripheral Landscapes Reveal About a Nation
  • Rewilding the Mind: Reconnecting Ourselves Before We Reconnect Nature
  • A Tale of Two Deserts

Cities, Construction, and the Architecture of Crisis:

  • Building Against Nature: Cautionary Tales for Our Times
  • The Danger of Forgetting (Bengaluru Focused)
  • A Slow Violence: Listening to the Unseen, Unspectacular Disasters of Our Time

Storycraft, Seeing, and the Art of Attention:

  • The Art of Seeing: Slowing Down in a Speeding World
  • The Listening Eye: Storytelling as Field Science
  • From Field to Frame: Crafting Visual Stories for the Age of Collapse