Naina is a researcher and facilitator trained in Sociology, Psychology, and Human-Computer Interaction at Columbia University. After six years in health tech, she began questioning why optimized output had become the primary currency in high-performing rooms—and what it costs us to create from depletion instead of desire.

In 2026, she founded Soma Rasa, a somatic studio exploring a central question:

What are we capable of creating from a fully alive body?

Drawing on Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic as a source of aliveness, knowledge, and creative power, Soma Rasa explores what becomes possible when we treat the body not as a vehicle for the mind, but as a source of intelligence in its own right.

As an Indian woman with an immigrant background, Naina found herself navigating two inheritances: the demands of high achievement and the memory of traditions that never fully separated the body from intelligence. Over two years of reconnecting with her own somatic intelligence, she began integrating her worlds as a slam poet, design technologist, social scientist, and existential philosopher into a multidisciplinary embodied practice.