Niteesh Elias
“Where are you from?” and “What’s your last name?” In India, your response reveals your religion and caste. Niteesh’s answer was complicated.
His experience of mixedness began at home, with a Catholic mother from the coastal Portuguese state of Goa and a Protestant father with Indigenous Gond roots from the Deccan heartland of Madhya Pradesh. He grew up Catholic—a religion that comprises only about 1.5 percent of India’s population—in bustling Mumbai, where Catholics were a minority even within his missionary-run Catholic high school.
Growing up in Mumbai, Niteesh spoke English at home and Marathi and Bambaiya Hindi with friends and people in his community. He celebrated Christmas, Diwali, Holi, and Eid. Summers were spent playing cricket in the maidans (open fields)—the one “religion” that has long unified India, even in its current divisive era. Still, Niteesh remembers walking home from a game with a school friend who said, “I’d invite you over if you were from my religion/caste.”
These early experiences shaped Niteesh’s lifelong attention to difference, belonging, and the quiet ways people listen—or fail to listen—to one another.
Trained in computer science, he followed his curiosity toward human-centered design and listening as a practice. He has conducted ethnographic studies in rural Indian villages and American manufacturing plants, and designed business models and products across healthcare, safety, energy efficiency, and other sectors. During his time at Honeywell Inc., where he held a directorial role, he helped establish a culture of customer discovery and coached designers, product managers, and executives on how bias interferes with understanding—and how empathetic listening can deepen connection with both customers and colleagues.
A listening artist, Niteesh works with listening as both material and tool. Through visual art, participatory experiences, and facilitated spaces for shared attention, he invites people to pause, reflect, and connect, informed by his Indigenous Gond heritage and its oral storytelling traditions. Spanning nearly two decades across visual design, enterprise, and human-centered innovation, his practice has come to center listening as a creative and civic act—one that makes room for belonging.
Through Freedom Tunnel Press, Niteesh is committed to amplifying a diversity of voices and creating space for writers and artivists to explore identity—or resist defining it—on their own terms, in ways that feel true to the stories they want to tell.
Brooke Shaffner
Brooke grew up part Garza, part Shaffner on the Texas-Mexico border. Her Garza grandfather was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who harvested citrus fruit before putting himself through school to become a pharmacist. Her Shaffner grandfather was raised Mennonite and the first in his family to attend college. She grew up singing Christmas carols with her hilarious tias leading synchronized hand jives and cheering at drag pageants in her town’s only gay bar. Her novel Country of Under is a book that straddles borders, bringing together drag queens, nuns, activists, artists, and healers. Country of Under won The 1729 Book Prize in Prose, judged by Diane Zinna, and is forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in April 2024. The novel was also the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up and was shortlisted for Dzanc Books’ Prize for Fiction and Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize. An excerpt won the Asheville Writers’ Workshop Fiction Contest.
Brooke and Niteesh recently moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they love reading poems to each other on Blue Ridge Mountain overlooks. Niteesh loves drawing, designing, and playing guitar and Brooke loves writing, reading, and running. They are words + pictures. They believe in mixedness and want to see more of it in literature. They are on the lookout for good people to bring on to Freedom Tunnel Press as it grows.
Rona Ramjas
Rona was born and raised on the Essequibo Coast of Guyana, a country with a complicated colonial past. Cited by The Center for Strategic and International Studies: “As in many other countries in the region, a long period of colonization and slavery left behind ethnocultural divides that have persisted to this day.” A descendant of South Asian Indentured Servants, Rona was for the most part, raised by her Hindu aunt who practiced Arya Samaj, a movement from India that rejected the idea of caste. Rona was dedicated to her worship, went to temple every Sunday, and did her pujas and rituals. However, her aunt, a strict Arya Samaj disciple, was thankfully relaxed about other religions, and also encouraged Rona to attend Catholic Church with her maternal grandfather who had converted due to British Colonization.
Rona was free to attend religious events with her muslim cousins and occasionally went to the Baptist Church with her neighbors. She eventually developed admiration for the drumming trance practices of folklore traditions with African roots that were pushed underground by British colonials. She was enamored by her brother’s Rastafarians friends, and felt a resonance with the half naked indigenous villagers in the rivers where she spent all of her summers away from her aunt and her religious routines. Growing up in a small coastal village, no one was a stranger to villagers who worshiped Kali or did Obeah and Voodoo or other spiritual practices that were considered “dark” but all of the above engrained in Rona, respect for differences and a cautiousness for spirituality in general.
Rona recently founded The Late Edition, a volunteer-led newsroom and living archive dedicated to honoring lives that might otherwise go unrecorded — the unhoused, the forgotten, and the uncounted. Through this work, she seeks to create a quiet place of remembrance where every life is treated as worthy of witness.
Ita (Sunandita) Mehrotra
Ita (Sunandita) Mehrotra is a visual artist, researcher and educator based out of New Delhi. Ita creates graphic narratives, non-fiction comics, illustrated text, and animation, often stemming from her ongoing engagements within people’s movements, and with a focus on citizenship, feminist leadership and memory keeping. Her work has been published and exhibited by thewire.in , Westland Books, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Tarq Mumbai, Fummetto Festival Luzern, popula.org, Zubaan Books, Goethe Institute, Yoda Press, AdAstra Comix, among others.
Ita has led community based arts programmes with children, young people and women for over a decade, and has run long-term programmes with The Community Libraries Project (Khirkee Village, New Delhi), Aagaaz Theater Trust (Nizzamudin Basti), Loka School (Bihar), among others. She led and directed the non-profit organisation Artreach India between 2017-2024. Ita works with community practices of visual storytelling, using materials and experiences from around the site, sensorial map-making, self-publishing and community exhibition making as bringing entire neighbourhoods and villages together for dialogue through her artistic practices.
Ita studied at Mirambika Free Progress school, a pioneering experimental learning space that greatly encouraged holistic development, learning through the arts and self learning. She has a Bachelors Degree in Philosophy (Hons.) from St.Stephens’ College, Delhi University (2010), from where she was awarded an exchange year at SciencesPo Paris (2011). At SciencesPo, Ita earned a Diploma in French Art History and Culture Studies. She returned to India to pursue a Masters at the School of Culture, Ambedkar University Delhi (2014). Ita’s MPhil from Arts and Aesthetics School, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2017) focuses on feminist graphic narratives in contemporary India.