Vandana Saras is a trilingual multimedia journalist, writer, and editor, based in New York City. She was born and raised in New Delhi, India, from where she emigrated in her teens.
In 2024, she received an M.S. in Journalism with a visual craft specialization from Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism—where she reported on unionization by workers in art institutions, representation of South Asian dancers, quality of care in emergency rooms, insurance denials, rise of injectables and plastic surgery amongst women, and use of Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) for the feline population. Her primary areas of interest are politics, investigative health care, aging, animal-human interactions—and what happens at their intersections.
An eclectic editor, Vandana has worked in AP Style editing for news and web with an eye toward audience engagement and SEO as well as fiction while she served as an editorial consultant at Witness and CRAFT literary magazines. She earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University where she also taught. Her novel—loosely drawn from incidents of gang rape in India—was selected as a top-five finalist in the international Mslexia Novel Competition.
As a visual journalist, Vandana is formally trained and adept at a myriad of mediums, digital and analog, lighting setups, and editing tools. Employing the latest video, audio and photography tools, she loves digital reporting on the streets but can also produce narratives in a studio under controlled conditions. She began her training on 35mm and medium-format manual cameras many years ago and now uses DSLRs and smartphones in her reporting. She has an individualized baccalaureate in Multimedia Arts and Engineering from CUNY.
Vandana is a lifelong meditator and enjoys dancing the Argentine Tango.
