When Nandita Dinesh ran community-based theater projects in conflict zones around the world, she had no idea a thriving South Asian arts community awaited her in the Bay Area, where she would get to fangirl over another Nandita, a legendary filmmaker.
The 2026 South Asian Literature and Arts Festival (SALA) erupts at Menlo College this weekend, featuring writers, visual artists, Nobel laureates and much in between. The topics will include economic displacement and climate change, plus questions of caste, class, gender, identity, belonging and memory.
Perhaps the most famous Nandita in the world, the global filmmaker Nandita Das, headlines the SALA Festival on Sunday night. Das last came to San Jose in 2019, when she received the Maverick Spirit Award at Cinequest and screened her film Manto, based on the life and work of Urdu writer and provocateur Sadaat Hasan Manto.
The other Nandita here, Nandita Dinesh, is an educator and writing coach who previously worked in India, Armenia, the US and South Africa. She was also a dean at Mount Tamalpais College inside San Quentin State Prison. Dinesh attended her first SALA Festival last year and came away inspired beyond anything she expected.
“I think I had tears in my eyes at some point,” Dinesh recalled. “I remember looking around and getting weirdly emotional about the whole thing.”
Through her own work, Dinesh explores the intersections between creativity, education, conflict, identity, memory and social change. After living as a creative in the US, off and on, for 20 years, Dinesh said she was blown away by the SALA Festival community, where she had conversations with diasporic South Asians in stereotypical professions—engineers and doctors—but who were also people that loved to write. They were trying to pursue writing outside of the careers they either chose for themselves or had foisted on them.
“It was really encouraging to see them wanting to find a way to break whatever mold that they had been forced into,” Dinesh said.
As a result, Dinesh approached the organizers and suggested a new component for this year’s festival. She started her own “Writers Cohort,” a transformative six-month mentorship program to help people develop a story for SALA 2026. The cohort included monthly two-hour virtual group sessions, plus personalized support from Dinesh. The participants were instructed to create pieces inspired by this year’s theme, “The Global Gaze, The South Asian Soul.”
So far, she has nine people in the group and they’ve met once a month to read each other’s work. In the intervening months, Dinesh met with each writer individually to workshop their piece with more focus.
“It’s been wonderful,” Dinesh said. “We have a whole range of artists. We have people writing fiction, we have people writing poetry, we have people writing memoir.”
After six months, the project now requires each participant to attend this year’s SALA Festival and talk about their work. Some of the participants are from Santa Clara County, while others are from across the country. None of them are professional writers.
“We have someone whose day job is in tech, we have someone whose day job is in law, someone whose day job is in finance, someone who’s a psychotherapist,” Dinesh said. “[Writing] is not what they’re doing with their lives for work, but it’s something that they really want to cultivate.”
The SALA Festival has an advisory board, an executive committee directed by Ambika Sahay, plus three curators—Kiran Malhotra, Mayuranki Almaula and Shikha Malaviya. All of whom spend most of the year putting together the festival. The 2026 edition promises to be another unique gathering, now enhanced by the Writers Cohort.
“What has been really surprising to me is I initially thought we would see only really new creatives,” Dinesh said of the Writers Cohort, adding that a few experienced writers are taking part, even if writing isn’t their day job. They all find writing to be a solitary process, but saw an opportunity to find community in that solitude.
By the time the festival ends on Sunday, Dinesh will not be the only one fangirling Nandita Das. No one will feel alone anymore. And the global gaze will reign free.
