Greetings! Thank you for visiting my website. Here you can find information on how I might work with you on conflict transformation, anti-oppression, artistic resistance, and more. I am a cultural worker and facilitator in people's movements for justice and dignity. Using personal narrative and embodied practice, I deepen conversations across difference and cultivate humanizing relationships. I integrate tools from multiple traditions to recover human connection between people at different ends of historical injustice. I mobilize my survivorship from violence for radical love, with an eye toward (dis)ability, disrupting power & hierarchy, and stopping harm. Here are some highlights. Please be in touch!
"A Mirror, A Threshold, A Song": interfacing with criminal-legal system, violence, brain injury, healing through theater & embodiment
Sacred witnessing of story, youth performance & community ritual with North Oakland Restorative Justice Council
I created this website in Oakland, California, on the unceded territory of the Ohlone people whose name for this place is Huichin. I give thanks to the keepers of this land and acknowledge the massive technological inequities that disproportionately impact indigenous people across the globe from accessing the Internet and related infrastructure that afford opportunities to earn income and thrive.
Additionally, on this website I have used pictures of textiles, mostly from Bengal and other parts of South Asia. I am grateful to the artisans who weaved, dyed, and produced these materials and others with longstanding knowledge of their craft.
I am an educator, trainer, transformative justice practitioner and restorative justice facilitator working at the borders of criminalization, intergenerational trauma, structural violence and youth empowerment. I have been blessed to serve as a politicized community healer within institutional settings (school, carceral domains), organizations/workplaces, and families/kinship networks.
I seek opportunities for dialogue and accountability regarding systemic oppression and the way it manifests in interpersonal relationships. I aim to creatively render and imagine solutions to social problems by centralizing the voices of those who directly experience them. I have innovated several programs in carceral settings and have been recognized as a leader in holding trauma-informed, liberatory spaces with incarcerated people through participatory theater and personal transformation. My curriculum "A Mirror, A Threshold, A Song: Medicines of Healing in Theater Arts and Restorative Justice" is available for digital purchase and limited orders in print.
Inspired by the rich tradition of Bengali cultural resistance, I learned theater in the movement and in the streets of my community. I support others to agitate through storytelling and implementing creative strategies for change. My lineage of bravery, truth-telling, and action is tempered by my caste-privileged Hindu heritage. I hold anti-caste and caste abolition politics, and draw inspiration from Dalit and Bahujan activists in excavating and exposing legacies of caste violence in the South Asian diaspora.
Tatiana Chaterji's Beyond HR Reporting workshop provides an incredible amount of deep, human-centered insight coupled with down-to-earth practical guidance on how to handle difficult issues in an impressively compassionate, restorative way that also achieves real justice. You can tell how thoughtfully she has developed these materials through her own lived experience in addition to many years of hard work around transformative and restorative justice. The principles backed up by several real examples of success in achieving RJ, something much of our world still struggles to even imagine as a goal.
-- Chand John, software engineer
Tatiana made me want to pay attention. It was her energy, body language, tone of voice. That really counts when you're teaching or leading a group.
-- Diamond, CURYJ youth leader who attended verbal de-escalation workshop
My teachers include Mimi Kim, bell hooks, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Badal Sircar, Audre Lorde, Selma James, Augusto Boal, Jerzy Grotowski, Silvia Federici, June Jordan, Mahasweta Devi, Armand Volkas, Luis Valdez, Mia Mingus, and countless students, collaborators and co-conspirators across the years.
Influences, Skills, & Guiding Frameworks
Popular Education & Participatory Action Research (Paolo Freire); Theatre of the Oppressed; Youth Leadership & Youth Development; Restorative Justice & Alternative Discipline Practices in Schools; Transformative Justice & Prison Abolition;
Reconciliation & Victim-Offender Dialogue in Communities, Prison, Re-Entry; Disability Justice & Inclusion; Intersectionality & Intersectional Feminist Analysis (steering committee of INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence - Boston, Kimberle Crenshaw, my queer & trans community of color/chosen family); Drama Therapy (Masters level coursework, California Institute for Integral Studies); Community-Based Non-Legal Conflict Mediation (affiliate and trainer, SEEDS Community Resolution Center); Poor Theater, Intimate Theater, Physical Theater (Arka Mukhopadhyay, Bibhaban, Alternative Living Theatre, other performance collectives in Kolkata, West Bengal); Writing Coach, Facilitator, Editor (tutor, Harvard College Writing Center 2006-08); Counter-Militarism & Truth-in-Recruiting (Susan Quinlan, Pablo Paredes, Ty Marshall, Abe Velazquez)
"I’ve been working at Juvenile Hall for 20 years and I have never seen the kids so engaged. I mean, out of their seat, paying attention, being positive." - Juvenile Justice Probation Officer