Sen is the daughter of Nobel Prize and Bharat Ratna laureate economist Amartya Sen and Padma Shri winner Nabanita Dev sen who is also one of the most prominent authors in the contemporary Bengali Literature. Her sister Antara Dev sen is a journalist. She spent her growing years in various cities across Europe, India and America. She is married to John Makinson, Chairman of Penguin Random house in June 2013.
Sen studied literature at Harvard University where she was awarded the Detur Prize for topping her class in the first year. She also won both the John Harvard Scholarship and the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Award for Academic Achievement of the Highest Distinction every year. She was elected into the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. She studied Film Producing at the Peter Stark Producing Program at the USC Film School. She trained as an actor at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, New York and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London.
Sen was a child when her first piece of writing was published in the magazine Sandesh, selected by Satyajit Ray. She wrote and directed several short films including her thesis film “Arranged Marriage” which was shown at multiple film festivals.
Child Rights
She promotes the cause of child protection besides acting in theatres and internationally. She is the Smile Ambassador for the global children’s NGO Operation Smile, UNICEF India’s National Celebrity for Child Protection and against Gender Based Violence and also the Cause Ambassador for RAHI(India’s first organisation about child sex abuse). She has collaborated with the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights as a Child Rights Expert and Juror of public Healings. She has been actively fighting against child trafficking in India with organisations like the NCPCR and the Terre des homes foundation as well as addressing the crisis in cinema. She has been invited to speak on the cause of child protection in international conferences including the Global Call to Action Summit for Child Survival and Development organised by USAID and the International Comprehensive Cleft care Conference of 2013.
Cinema
Sen has starred in over 20 feature films in various languages across multiple countries. She won the prestigious Kalakar award for Best Actress in 2015 for the Hindi film Rang Rasiya. She bagged her first role in cinema with Goutam Ghoshe’s film The Doll (gudiya) while she was still a student which was premiered at the Uncertain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. She made an entry in Bollywood in 2005 by playing the role Rani Mukherjee’s 17 year old younger sister in Black. Her performance was acclaimed by both audience and critic and earned her a nomination for Breakthrough Performance of the Year.
Having worked with a number of Indian directors like Ram Gopal Verma and Ketan Mehta, she signed for an important role in a terrorist-themed American drama The War Within (2005) which was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2010, she starred in the Bengali super-hit film Autograph which earned her the TeleCine Award for Best Actress and the Reliance Big Bangla Rising Star Award. Nandana also starred in the 2014 film Rang Rasiya which was screened at 2008 The Times BFI London Film Festival. She has been a favourite cover girl of leading magazines for men as well as women like Femina, Savvy, FHM, Man’s World and Maxim.
Writing
Sen is a screenwriter, a maker of short films and a published writer in multiple genres including poetry, narrative non-fiction and Op Eds. She also worked as literary editor at Houghton Mifflin Company. Her first original screenplay that was made into a film was Forever, funded by Telefilm Canada. She was commissioned by Divani Films to adapt R.K. Narayan’s novel waiting For The Mahatma into a film script and by Big Bang Company to write an original script on a father-daughter relationship. She is collaborating with Italian filmmaker Franco La Cecla on a script about the history of kiss in Indian cinema. She has translated a book of poems by her mother titled Make Up Your Mind. Sen’s first children’s book in verse called Kiss This Kangaroo will be published by Otter-Barry Books followed by “Mambi and the Forest Fire” and “Love Book” in 2016. She is also writing a book on three generations of rule-dying Bengali women called “Shamelessly Female” which grew from an essay she published with the same title. She frequently contributes articles to newspapers and journals.
Filmography
She has starred in several Hindi films like The Doll/gudia, My Wife’s Murder, Tango Charlie, Black, Marigold and more. She has done some feature films like Forever and The Silence/Chuppee as well as English films like Seducing Maarya, Bokshu, The Myth, The War Within, The world Unseen, Perfect Mismatch and many more. She has even done an Italian film Branchie and a Bengali film Autograph.
