Anuradha Kapur is a theatre maker and teacher. Her plays have travelled nationally and internationally, and she has taught in universities in India and abroad. She is the founder of Vivadi, a working group of theatre makers, visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers. Among her acclaimed productions are Virasat (2013), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2012), Jeevit ya Mrit (2011), Centaurs (2006), Pata Shahar Mumbai (2004), Antigone Project (co-directed with Ein Lall, 2003) and Sundari: An Actor Prepares (1997). Her writings on performance have been widely anthologized, and she has authored a book, Actors Pilgrims Kings and Gods: The Ramlila at Ramnagar (1993, 2004). She won the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for Direction in 2004. Anuradha Kapur completed her term as Director, National School of Drama, New Delhi, in 2013. She is presently Visiting Professor at Ambedkar University Delhi.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is an independent scholar and cultural theorist. He is the author of a number of books on film, including Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (1984), The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (co-authored with Paul Willemen, 1994, 1999), Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009), and has edited Kumar Shahani: The Shock of Desire and other essays (2015). He has curated (with Geeta Kapur) Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001 (Tate Modern, London, 2002), You Don’t Belong, a festival of independent video and documentary films in China (2011) and तह–सतह: A Very Deep Surface, Mani Kaul and Ranbir Singh Kaleka: Between Film and Video (Jaipur, 2017), as well as several other festival programmes. He has been a visiting faculty at the Korean National University of Art, Seoul, Lingnan University, Hong Kong and the University of Chicago.
Geeta Kapur is a Delhi-based critic and curator. Her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000) and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming). Her curatorial work includes an exhibition co-curated at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1982); a re-hang at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi (1994); ‘Dispossession’, at the Johannesburg Biennale (1995); ‘Bombay/Mumbai’, Century City, co-curated with Ashish Rajadhyaksha at Tate Modern, London (2001); ‘subTerrain’, at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003); ‘Aesthetic Bind’, five exhibitions at Chemould Prescott, Mumbai (2013–14). She was Jury member for the Biennales of Venice (2005), Dakar (2006), Sharjah (2007).
Geeta Kapur was one of the founder-editors of Journal of Arts & Ideas, an advisory board member of Third Text, and a trustee and advisory editor of Marg. She was advisory member, Asian Art Council, Guggenheim Museum; Asia Tate Research Centre; and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. A Trustee of the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF), Delhi, she is the series editor of Art Documents (SSAF–Tulika Books).
Indira (Indu) Chandrasekhar, Publisher and Managing Editor of Tulika Books, New Delhi, has been associated with Indian publishing since the early 1980s. Beginning her publishing career with Macmillan India, she worked for several years as a freelance editor, with brief stints of teaching in colleges in Bangalore and Delhi in the intervening years, before setting up Tulika Books in 1995.
Tulika Books is a small and independent publisher of academic books in the social sciences and humanities, and the authors published by Tulika include some of India’s best known intellectuals, theorists and academics. Over the years, Tulika has developed a niche list of books in the arts and cultural studies – which includes books on individual artists, thematic volumes on art projects and initiatives, as well as volumes that deal with issues and themes of contemporary art and cultural practice and their socio-political significance. Several of these are published in association with arts institutions.
Indira (Indu) is a founding partner of the Independent Publishers’ Distribution Alternatives (IPDA), a distribution network set up by eight independent publishers to promote alternative/independent publishing in India, as well as a member of the Paris-based International Alliance of Independent Publishers.
Shyam Menon is an educator and practitioner of institutional development in higher education. He was Professor at the University of Delhi and the founding Vice Chancellor of the Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi. He has been on the faculty of the Indira Gandhi National Open University, Central Institute of Educational Technology and the M.S. University of Baroda. He studied at the University of Kerala and at the M.S. University of Baroda. He was a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He co-edited the journal Perspectives in Education for several years. He has served on the Task Force on Access and Equity in Higher Education constituted by the International Association of Universities, UNESCO. He is currently Director, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore and Chair of the Higher Education Commission constituted by the Government of Kerala in September 2021.
Vidya Shivadas is a curator based in New Delhi. She completed her Master’s in Art Criticism from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda in 2000. She is the Director of the not-for-profit Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), set up in 2007 to support artists, art historians, curators, art critics and other professionals devoted to the study of contemporary Indian art, as well as to conduct educational and art outreach programmes. She has curated a number of exhibitions at the Vadehra Art Gallery since 2002, and guest-curated exhibitions at the Devi Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Edinburgh Art Festival.
In 2007, she received a fellowship from Goethe-Institut and the Education Department of Documenta 12 to participate, with five other international curators, in the Educational Programme of Documenta 12, between 17 May and 23 September. In 2009, she was awarded the Asia Art Archive Research Grant to map the discipline of art criticism as it has developed the Indian context, from independence to the present.
Vidya Shivadas has been visiting faculty at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi, since 2013. She is also on the faculty for the Post Graduate Diploma in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art and Curatorial Studies at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai. Since 2014 she has been the Curatorial Consultant for Students’ Biennale, Kochi Biennale Foundation, mentoring a team of fifteen curators as they research and engage with art schools across the country and generate an exhibition platform from this process.