Surbhi Gupta is South Asia Editor at New Lines magazine. She is also one of the Li Global Fellows for 2022, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Prior to that, she was a staff writer with The Indian Express, a leading national daily in India, writing on culture, politics, and the internet. Surbhi was born and raised in New Delhi, and is currently based in New York City.

She has reported extensively on the diverse arts, culture and literary scene in India. Apart from interviewing artists and writers from around the world, she has also covered lesser-reported topics such as the rise of street hip hop in the country, resistance art in Kashmir, and the revival of Dastangoi, an age-old storytelling tradition in Urdu. She also documented stories of old, family-owned eateries, tucked in the bylanes of Old Delhi, for a weekly column ‘Families in Food’ in The Indian Express’s Sunday magazine. They told tales of migration, the Partition, and age-old recipes surviving the test of time.

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, she tracked new beats for the newspaper: from the impact on delivery and e-commerce services to the changing trends in the retail sector, online healthcare initiatives, citizen-led initiatives for stranded migrants, and lockdown induced changes in personal, professional and social lives of Indians.

Surbhi holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication from University of Delhi, postgraduate degree from Asian College of Journalism and a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School.

During her time at Columbia, she focused on stories related to the South Asian diaspora in the United States and worked on a long form feature on the culture of body shaming in South Asia. She also used the time to study the life and works of American jazz legend John Coltrane, politics of modern Middle Eastern art, and history of rumor and fake news. As Vice President of the campus chapter of South Asian Journalists Association, she organized talks, workshops and panel discussions with leading journalists for the students.