What you find here is not a resume. It is a root system — the ancestral, the formational, the devotional, the ecological. The threads that were given and the threads that were chosen. What I carry and what carries me.
on indigenous Lenape land
Sushmita Mukherjee is an imaging scientist, interspiritual minister, and poet drawn to the threshold where seeing becomes sensing becomes saying — where images breathe freely, meaning stays unfinished, paradox is celebrated, and questions outlast their answers.
She directs a multi-modal imaging core facility at Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University — years spent teaching scientists to see, to attend, precisely and with patience, to what light reveals at the edge of resolution. She is a faculty member at The Thread Interfaith Seminary, leads regular worship services at South Nassau Unitarian Universalist Congregation, and accompanies individuals in spiritual direction.
Sushmita is a descendant of an ancient lineage of teachers. In her, though, the inherited masculine teaching style of knowledge transmission has metamorphosed into a practice where questions appear as thresholds — to be entered together, with reverence and patience. And in that staying with the often uncomfortable unclarity, the relational field appears to respond — not necessarily with answers — but with a deepening of the inquiry.
A third-generation exile from the Bengal river delta, she now lives on Roosevelt Island, New York, where the East River is her daily teacher — a different river, and yet in deep conversation with the river of her ancestors.
My name in its original Bengali form is Mukhopadhyay. Mukhya means primary. Upadhyay means teacher. My ancestors — the men of my lineage — ran Sanskrit schools in the villages of Bengal.
I did not choose this name. It chose me, the way all inherited things do — arriving before we have the language to question or refuse them.