Rebecca Devika Dharmapalan (b.1996) is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and social theorist. Dharmapalan’s practice engages in conversation on memory, resistance, ontological genocide, and trauma. 

Dharmapalan’s interest in revolutionary movements was sparked when she first learned about the Black Panther Party’s foundational work in the city she was born and raised in: Oakland, California. Seeing overlaps with the armed revolutionary movement of her own people, her work observes the patterns and overlap of oppressed communities globally. 

Dharmapalan has her bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of California Berkeley and her master’s from SOAS University of London where she studied Human Rights Law. Dharmapalan was Glamour’s College Woman of the Year 2017, awarded Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21, and an OZY Genius Award winner 2018.

Her book, My Pen is Sharp Like the Gun in My Hand: On the Revolutionary Feminism of the Tamil Tigers, expands upon her research on women cadres of the LTTE, blending oral history, photography, and political theory to explore how revolutionary Tamil women redefined the limits of feminist thought and resistance.