Profile
Paddmini Chakma is an activist, photographer, and visual storyteller based in Bangladesh, from the Chakma Indigenous community of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Her work confronts narratives that marginalise, misrepresent, exoticise, or erase Indigenous peoples, examining how Indigenous realities are shaped and spoken for within mainstream visual and cultural frameworks. Grounded in lived experience and activism, her practice explores questions of identity, power, and representation.
Chakma engages subaltern ways of seeing and intersectional approaches to highlight layered Indigenous realities, asserting Indigenous authority in storytelling and reclaiming control of representation. Her work has received the Indigenous Community Grant, the Bangladesh Press Photo Award in 2023, and the Artist Changemaker Award from Global Fund for Women in 2025.
