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.
Photo credit: Rashmi Kaleka
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, forthcoming, Speech Act and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice. She was Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (1976–77) and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi (1985–90). 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 an advisory member of the Asian Art Council, Guggenheim Museum; and Asia Tate Research Centre. She is the series editor of ‘Art Documents’, published under the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF)–Tulika Books imprint.
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 for about three decades. He was founding Vice Chancellor of the Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi. He has earlier 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 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 had served on the Task Force on Access and Equity in Higher Education constituted by the International Association of Universities, UNESCO. He had been Chair of the Commission for Reforms in Higher Education of the Government of Kerala. He is at present Vice Chancellor, BML Munjal University, Gurgaon.
Vidya Shivadas is a curator based in New Delhi. She is the Director of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, a non-profit arts organisation that works in the field of art education and aims to broaden the audience for contemporary Indian art, enhance opportunities for artists, and establish a continuous dialogue between the arts and the public through education and active participation in public art projects.
Shivadas has curated a number of exhibitions at the Vadehra Art Gallery since 2005 as well as guest curated exhibitions at Devi Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Edinburgh Art Festival. She was the visual arts curator for Serendipity Arts Festival 2023. Shivadas is Visiting Faculty at School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi since 2013.