Arati Kumar-Rao

Arati Kumar-Rao (India) is an independent photographer, writer and National Geographic Explorer whose work examines the relationships between people, wildlife and the landscapes they inhabit. Through long-term, immersive reporting across South Asia, she documents how disappearing groundwater, habitat destruction, industrial expansion and the loss of common lands reshape ecosystems and livelihoods, often displacing communities and pushing species toward extinction.

Before becoming a full-time storyteller, Arati studied physics and worked in the corporate world. She later turned to photography and writing as complementary ways of understanding environmental change, combining careful research with extended time in the field. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Emergence Magazine, the BBC and The Guardian, and in 2023 she was included in the BBC 100 Women list.

Her first book, Marginlands: A Journey into India’s Vanishing Landscapes, brings together years of fieldwork across some of the country’s most vulnerable ecosystems and the communities whose lives are closely connected to them. The book won Book of the Year at both the Green Litfest and Publishing Next awards in 2024 and was later included among the Best Books of 2025 by Foreign Affairs and Publishers Weekly.

Based between Bangalore and the Western Ghats, Arati continues to work across photography, writing and long-form environmental storytelling. Her current National Geographic-supported project explores human migration across India and the environmental, economic and social forces that shape movement. Across her work, landscapes are not simply backgrounds to human stories, but living systems in which people, wildlife, memory and culture are deeply interconnected.