Barnali Ghosh

Barnali Ghosh is a Berkeley based designer, community historian, artist, and walking/biking advocate.

Ghosh is the co-creator of the monthly Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, one of the city’s most popular community history projects, telling the secret history of four generations of immigrant activists. The tour is based on original archival research and oral history, and attracts participants from across California. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, was voted Best of the East Bay, and received a national award from Asian Pacific Islanders for Historical Preservation. She was a lead organizer for the campaign to name Shattuck Avenue East “Kala Bagai Way,” the first downtown street named after a woman of color.

She currently serves as the mayor’s appointee to the Berkeley Planning Commission and Transportation Commission. A registered California Landscape architect, she's spent a decade designing public parks, schools, and streets across California and brings her experience to her commission and organizing work to develop local solutions to the global issue of climate change.

She is on the coordinating committee of Walk Bike Berkeley, which advocates for a healthy, equitable, and sustainable transportation system in Berkeley. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Ghosh combined her focus on transportation safety and racial justice, as one of the lead advocates for the Berkeley Department of Transportation, a planned city department that would bring together transportation engineers, designers and unarmed traffic enforcement in an effort to create safe streets for all, an idea that has received national media coverage. She also serves on the City’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force.

As a website designer Ghosh provides services to organizations that promote the health and well-being of our communities.

Ghosh's latest project is a series of photographic self portraits that highlight the beauty of the flowers of Berkeley, her home, and the fabrics of India, her homeland. Prints and posters are available for purchase on her website.