Meha Desai is a Mauritian–Indian documentary photographer, writer, and obsessive archivist of lives lived on the margins. Her work engages with long-form storytelling, focusing on migration, labour, climate change, and the quiet resilience of communities often left at the edges of dominant narratives. Trained in English literature and art history, she approaches photography as both document and dialogue — a way of paying attention, of spending time, and of being in conversation with the lives she photographs.
Her practice moves between image, text, and fieldwork, exploring how people build meaning and continuity within shifting social and ecological landscapes. She works collaboratively and over time, seeking forms of representation that are reciprocal, grounded, and alive to context.
Desai collaborates with NGOs, grassroots initiatives, cultural institutions, and editorial platforms to create photographs and stories rooted in trust, consent, and care. She is co-founder of resort, a collective of artists and researchers engaged in care-based and decolonial cultural practices, and a member of the VII Community.
