Indu Chinta documents and preserves cultural heritage through publications and photographs. She has been researching into theyyam, a traditional expression of religious worship in Kerala, and has documented more than a hundred theyyams through photographs. Her work won the Kerala government’s Kerala Folklore Academy Award in 2020. Her books include Theyyam: Merging with the Divine (2018) and Iconography of Deepam: Traditional Lamps of Kerala (2023). She has a Master’s in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and worked with policy think-tanks in India, on the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), and was associated with the first edition of Carbon Zero Challenge at IIT Madras.