Sandhya Nankani, Principal and Founder

An award-winning producer, author, publishing consultant, and thought leader, Sandhya founded Literary Safari in 2008. She has over two decades of experience conceptualizing, developing, and publishing engaging and educational digital and print content and curriculum for children and adults. In all her work, she has been guided by the varied and interdisciplinary entrepreneurial experiences she had early on in her career running a college learning center, operating a family business in men’s retail, and working as a freelance journalist and editor both in the US and overseas.

Over the years, she has taught College Composition to college freshman, edited the award-winning Writing for Teens magazine, collaborated with Google for Educators, authored hi-low and leveled fiction and nonfiction readers for Heinemann's Fountas & Pinnell programs, developed several middle school ELA programs, designed learning games, and written curriculum for the New York Times Learning Network, PBS, and Sesame Workshop. Her fiction and non-fiction writing has been published in The Lily (Washington Post), Quartz, Ms. Magazine, Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop blog, Toca Boca Magazine, Sepia Mutiny, and the Routledge Handbook of Media Education Futures Post-Pandemic. She is the editor of the multidisciplinary anthology Breaking the Silence: Domestic Violence in the South Asian American Community and a memoir/biography Moments with a Master: Meetings with Dada JP Vaswani. She has presented at international conferences including Google EdFoo, PBS Learning Day, Games for Change Festival, OMEP (Organisation Mondiale pour l’Education Préscolaire/World Organisation for Early Childhood Education and Care) World Conference, UNESCO Forum on Global Citizenship Education and hosted/produced live author Q&As for Parents Magazine, LitWorld, and public libraries.

Born in Ghana and raised there, in India, and in the United States, Sandhya holds an undergraduate degree in History and a Masters of International and Public Affairs from Columbia University. An alumni of Scholastic Education and Weekly Reader classroom magazines, she was a founding member of KIDMAP (Kids' Inclusive and Diverse Media Action Project), a grassroots coalition of children’s media professionals committed to representation in digital content for children, served on the Education Committee of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York City, and is president of the board of trustees of her local public library in New Jersey. She has served on award committees for Good Housekeeping’s Best Books Awards, the Cybil Awards, and the Japan Prize.