Arunima Sengupta

Arunima Sengupta has always been someone who says yes to the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, and the untested. It is a quality that defined her Teach For India Fellowship in 2019, and one that has carried her from the classrooms of Mumbai to the founding of Artent Education Foundation, an organisation committed to making art and creative careers accessible for children in government schools across India.

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Her Fellowship experience was, by her own account, one of the most transformative of her life. Teaching a classroom of 65 Students in Mumbai, she created learning spaces that stretched well beyond academics, drawing on drama, dance, sports, and visual arts as tools for growth, confidence, and self-belief. What she witnessed there permanently shifted her understanding of what meaningful education can look like. The Fellowship also gave her something she had not expected: an appetite for ownership. She found herself saying yes repeatedly, to mentoring incoming Fellows, to serving as a Fellow Advisor at Institute, to leading the Dramebaaz Mumbai chapter through the pandemic, and to interning with the Mumbai city team to research art-based learning models. Her Be The Change Project (BTCP), Kalakriti, was the seed; Artent Education Foundation is what it became.

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After the Fellowship, Arunima returned to Pune, not by default but by choice. What drew her back was the quality of community she found there: Alumni across cohorts and sectors consistently showing up for one another, sharing opportunities, and building together. Over time, that ecosystem became more than a network. It became a real source of support as she navigated the demands of founding and leading a young organisation, and it is what led her to give back by joining the Chapter Committee. The work is voluntary, layered, and often unglamorous, but it has reinforced something she has always believed: that lasting change is built by people who choose to show up.