Writing Initiatives

By  Sheena Maria Piedade

Sheena Maria Piedade is a facilitator, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Her focus as a practitioner is on making community care accessible through contemplative practices, play, engagement with nature, and embodiment. Her artistic and pedagogical work explores DIY culture, publishing, ecology and sociocultural phenomena. In her spare time, she runs LOVER, an online magazine and itinerant salon and reading room.

Sheena has spent the last five years working with her family’s visual archives, alternating and weaving the personal with the political. Since 2021, she has run the archival project Soboicar with Jane Borges in partnership with the Citizens Archive of India, documenting the stories of Catholic migrants from the Konkan who made South Bombay their home

Read More

By Vikram Iyengar

Vikram Iyengar is an arts leader and connector based in Calcutta, India, and working internationally. He is a dancer-cho reographer-director, curator-presenter, arts consultant and administrator, and arts researcher-writer. Co-founder and artistic director of Ranan Performance Collective, he also leads the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation – a hub for dance and movement practice and discourse. His scope of workspans practice, discourse, critique, ideation, strategy, and management, revolving around the central tenet of creating deep connections with and through the arts.

Trained in Kathak by Padmashree Smt. Rani Karnaa, Vikram’s performance work is noted for the conscious bringing together of classical dance, movement, drama, and design creating an experience of total theatre. His range of work spans choreography for stage and film, dance and theatre explorations, and performance collaborations. Vikram’s international credits include choreographer for Academy Award winner Florian Gallenberger’s film, Shadows in Time, and co choreographer on Helena Waldmann’s Faust prize nominated piece, Made in Bangladesh.

Read more.

By Pruthu Parab & Varsha Adibhatla

Pruthu Parab is a composer, sound engineer, and educator, with a Master’s degree in English Literature. When he’s not busy contemplating what makes us tick as a species and why we express ourselves the way we do, he composes music for film, advertising, and theatre, and teaches English to teenagers in school. He lives with his cat Lilith in a quaint village in Goa.

Varsha Adibhatla, a sociologist and educator, has delved into the realm of Foucauldian discourses and her scholarly pursuits have taken her to diverse avenues over the years. She approaches her research with a deep commitment to intellectual rigour and critical inquiry. Her exploration of power dynamics, knowledge construction, and subjectivity intertwines seamlessly with her interest in the performing arts. As an educator, Varsha encourages her students to engage with sociological concepts through a multidimensional lens. Through her work, she aspires to emerge as a rising voice in the realm of sociological scholarship, continually pushing the boundaries of understanding and shedding light on the intricate intersections of power, knowledge, and the arts.

Read more.

By Najrin Islam

Najrin Islam is a Delhi-based writer and curator, whose research interest is situated at the intersection of image histories, archival politics, and institutional omissions. She has written for several platforms, including e-flux Criticism, PhotoSouthAsia, Runway Journal, Alternative South Asia Photography, Critical Collective, and ART India. She is a recipient of the Art Scribes Award 2022–23 (conferred by the Prameya Art Foundation and the French Institute in India), as part of which she attended the La Napoule Art Foundation (LNAF) Residency Programme at Château de la Napoule, France, in March 2023. She has also been granted a residency through the Art Writers’ Award 2018–19 (conferred by Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council and TAKE on Art magazine), which resulted in the production of the monograph, Archive as Medium: Exploring the Performative Body. Her most recent curatorial project was a film programme titled “Perceptual Transfers”, mounted at Bikaner House, New Delhi, in January/February 2023.

Read more.

By Elizabeth Yorke

Elizabeth Yorke is a chef turned food researcher and an advocate for sustainable food systems. She is the co-founder of Edible Issues, a collective that is fostering thought and conversation on the Indian Food System, and the founder of Saving Grains, an upcycling food initiative inspired by the historically circular relationship between brewers and bakers.

Read more.

By Deepshikha Kalsi

Deepshikha Kalsi, founder of the Textile Conservation Studio, New Delhi, is an independent art conservator. Trained in textile conservation at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Abegg Stiftung, Bern, and CIETA, Lyon, she is currently the assistant coordinator of the Textile Working Group of the Committee for Conservation for the International Council of Museums. Deepshikha serves as Visiting Faculty at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, and has worked for over two decades to tailor conservation solutions for museums, private collections, and institutions, including the National Museum, New Delhi, the Mehrangarh Museum, Jodhpur, the Indian Museum, Kolkata, among others. Deepshikha has an upcoming volume on the study of ancient textile fragments from the Stein Collection, co-authored with Rahul Jain and Vinay Singh, and has contributed to a number of publications. Her research and fieldwork have been supported by the Nehru Trust, the Charles Wallace India
Trust, the Simon Digby Trust, and the Bonita Trust.

Read more.

By Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is either an ‘accidental’ editor who strayed into publishing from a career in finance and accounts or an ‘accidental’ finance person who found his calling in publishing. As editor at HarperCollins Publishers India and Penguin Books India, he helped launch what came to be regarded as the go-to cinema, music, and culture list in Indian publishing. He also initiated a joint cinema imprint with MAMI, the first of its kind in Indian publishing. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next.

He is a film and music buff and writes regularly on books, films and music for a number of platforms, and has over 200 bylines. He is also a published author, with two books to his credit: Whims – A Book of Poems (published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin).

Read more.

By Yatin Pandya

Yatin Pandya is an author, academician, researcher, and practising architect with his firm FOOTPRINTS E.A.R.T.H. (Environment Architecture Research Technology Housing). He has been involved with city planning, urban design, mass housing, architecture, interior design, product design, and conservation projects. Yatin has won over forty national and international awards for architectural design, research as well as dissemination. The most recent ones have been the United Nations Habitat Award Special Mention and the United States’ Curry Stone Foundation Design Prize for sustainable practice.

He has over 300 publications to his credit, in national and international journals. His books, such as Concepts of Space in Traditional Indian Architecture and Elements of Space Making, have been published internationally. Yatin has served as Visiting Faculty at the National Institute of Design and CEPT University and guest lecturer/critic in various universities in India and abroad. Environmental sustainability, socio-cultural appropriateness, timeless aesthetics, and economic afford ability are the key principles of his work

Read more.

By Rohit Goel

Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.

Read more.

By Trina Nileena Banerjee

After completing her MA in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Trina Nileena Banerjee earned an M.St. in English from the University of Oxford. For her PhD, she worked on a history of women in the group theatre movement in Bengal between 1950 and 1980. Her essays have appeared in national and international journals as well as several edited volumes. Between 2011 and 2013, she taught at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU. She is currently Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her research interests include Gender, Performance, Political Theatre, Theories of the Body, Postcolonial Theatre, and South Asian History. She has also been a theatre and film actress, as well as a journalist and fiction writer. Her book Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal was published by Oxford University Press (India) in October 2021.

Read more.

By Latika Gupta

Latika Gupta completed an M.Phil. in Visual Studies from JNU and has received grants from the India Foundation for the Arts and the Nehru Trust for independent research projects. She was a research fellow at SOAS, London (2017) on a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship. She has worked as a curator at NGMA, KHOJ, on independent visual arts exhibitions and curated the permanent exhibition for a trade routes artefacts museum in Kargil, Ladakh. Latika taught at the Dr BDL Museum’s postgraduate diploma course and was co-mentor for the Curatorial Intensive South Asia programme in 2019, 2021, & 2023. From 2016-2020, she was Associate Editor at MARG Publications. She is a part of the editorial collective ‘100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object’ and an associate editor of South Asian Studies. She teaches art history as Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University and works as Director, Projects at the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation.

Read more

By Samyukta Ninan

Samyukta Ninan is a free-spirited cultural and heritage enthusiast who travels widely, documenting the tangible and intangible traditions of India. She is training to be a Bharatnatyam dancer and has blended her interest in the cultural and performative traditions of India with her own training as a dancer. As a storyteller and educator, Samyukta does heritage walks for young heritage enthusiasts and has also trained and mentored students in the same. She experiments with the performing arts in her pedagogical practices as an educator. The past fascinates Samyukta, and she uses the medium of films and theatre to bring stories from our cultural heritage to her audience. She relaxes while gardening and reading books and enjoys quiet evenings with her partner and child.

Read more

By Kadamboor Neeraj

Kadamboor Neeraj is a visual artist, researcher, writer and editor whose research interests lie in modern and contemporary South Asian art. Neeraj graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting, and a Master’s degree in Art History and Aesthetics. He has written on contemporary Indian art for online and print publications. He is currently researching alternative pedagogical models in art schools in South Asia with a particular focus on fairs and melas in these institutions and how they have shaped their histories and social identities.

Read More

By Rumi Samadhan

Rumi Samadhan is an independent researcher, curator, and visual artist based in Mumbai and Kolhapur. She has a PG degree in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art and Curatorial Studies from Dr. BDL Museum, Mumbai. Her research interests are Existential Politics and Museum & Regional Studies. Her curatorial practice has closely engaged with Ambedkarite philosophy and consciousness. As a Fellow at Khoj’s Curatorial Intensive South Asia (CISA) 2019, Rumi curated the group exhibition, The Mahad Satyagraha – ‘Erasure’ as a Form of Assertion, which centred the Mahad Satyagraha as a pivotal moment of rupture within the practice of untouchability in India. She had responded to the 2020 pandemic induced labour crisis, through her co-curation Broken Foot – Unfolding Equalities, where 60 artists came together to present a collective voice of solidarity and dissent.

Read More

By Tej Haldule

Tej Haldule is a writer who lives in Goa. His diverse portfolio includes articles, interviews, listicles and opinion pieces for print magazines and webzines including Wild City, Platform, the Juice, NH7, BorderMovement, Subbacultcha! Amsterdam, Vogue India, and Creation Spain, a monthly column on Rolling Stone India, marquee long-reads for the print edition of GQ India, and dozens of full episodes of an award-winning Hindi show for All India Radio. He has worked as a production and post-production assistant on the critically acclaimed National Film Award-winning feature Chauthi Koot. Early in his career, he has also written culture features for local supplements of national newspapers. Most at ease when donning several hats, he has variously been a playwright, book editor, music curator and has even dabbled, on occasions best forgotten, in stage and screen acting.

Read More

By Vyjayanthi Rao

Vyjayanthi Rao is an anthropologist, writer, and curator focussing on displacement, memory, material cultures, and imaginaries of the future, with a particular interest in speculative practices in contemporary social life. Her work has been published widely, in journals, edited volumes, catalogue texts, and magazines. Vyjayanthi received her Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago. She has taught at The New School for Social Research and the Spitzer School of Architecture. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Public Culture. She was part of the curatorial team of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 6th edition (2022), co-curating the exhibition Multiplicity with Tau Tavengwa. She will be participating as an artist in the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennale and is curating the show CFA Lab: Seeking Refuge and Making Home in NYC for the Center for Architecture in New York.

Read More