Jaya Luintel

Jaya Luintel is a feminist researcher, journalist, and narrative justice and peace practitioner from Nepal whose work spans gender justice, memory, storytelling, transitional justice, social norms, and peacebuilding. She began her professional journey as a broadcast journalist in 1999 and has since worked across media, research, policy, and community practice to challenge gender stereotypes, amplify women’s voices, and strengthen more inclusive forms of knowledge production and public engagement.

She is the Co-Founder and President of The Story Kitchen, a feminist initiative that challenges gendered knowledge systems by questioning whose knowledge counts, whose experiences are treated as credible, and who has the authority to shape public memory. At The Story Kitchen, Jaya has played a central role in designing and developing feminist, ethical, and community-rooted approaches to storytelling, oral history, reflective practice, and narrative justice. She played a leading role in positioning storytelling as a method for healing, knowledge production, advocacy, movement-building, collective memory, and social change.

Since 2015, Jaya has worked closely with women survivors of conflict-related sexual violence and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence from Nepal’s ten-year armed conflict. Through The Story Kitchen, she has supported survivor-led reflection, truth documentation, healing, advocacy, public memory, and movement-building. This work has contributed to Nepal’s transitional justice discourse by bringing sustained attention to CRSV, survivors’ agency, and the need for justice mechanisms to respond to survivors’ lived realities rather than treating testimony as an extractive process. Her engagement with the Women, Peace and Security agenda includes serving as a gender expert to Nepal’s Ministry of Home Affairs during the drafting of the second phase of the National Action Plan on UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820, with particular attention to the rights, recognition, and participation of women survivors of CRSV.

Jaya holds a PhD in Applied Conflict Transformation Studies from the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and Paññāsāstra University of Cambodia. Her doctoral research developed Truth Listening (सत्य श्रवण), a feminist grounded theory and framework that offers an alternative to dominant truth-telling and truth-seeking approaches in transitional justice. Truth Listening shifts responsibility away from requiring survivors to speak in order to be recognised and toward formal mechanisms being prepared to listen ethically, recognise harm on survivors’ terms, and respond justly. Jaya also teaches Men and Masculinities in the Gender Studies Master’s program at Tribhuvan University in Nepal.

Her recognitions include being named one of the BBC 100 Women in 2014 and an Asia Foundation Development Fellow in the same year. She was a Global Change Leaders Fellow and Coady Women’s Leadership Research Fellow in 2016, a Perennial Fellow in 2020, and a Yale Peace Fellow in 2026.