Most of Anuradha’s directorial work has been in collaboration with visual and video artists and filmmakers, including Arpita Singh, Bhupen Khakhar, Ein Lall, Madhusree Dutta, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, Sumant Jayakrishnan, and Vivan Sundaram.

She is one of the founder members of Vivadi, a working group of painters, musicians, writers and theatre practitioners, formed in 1989. Her theatre work has travelled to countries including Germany, Japan, Brazil, UK, and Korea.

In 2004, Anuradha was awarded the Sangeet Natak Award for Direction in the Theatre.

Among her acclaimed productions are Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghar aur Bahar, Umrao, Romeo and Juliet, The Job, Sundari: an Actor Prepares, a play based on the life of Jaishankar Sundari, Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in collaboration with Ein Lall; a Hindi version of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls and many others.

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His solo exhibitions include In my own World shown at Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Varanasi, Living Faith exhibited at Delhi, Kolkata, New York and San Francisco, Colours – an Indian Language shown at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland. His group exhibitions are numerous and in addition to them he has also published three books – Bazaar, Living Faith and Right of the Line – The President’s Bodyguard, which was commissioned by the Rashtrapati Bhawan and Sahapedia.

Dinesh is also the co-founder and managing trustee of Nazar Foundation, which has been set up to promote photography as an art-form. Photography is not just a profession and a passion for Dinesh but his means of understanding and feeling the world and life around him.

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An Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a visiting Professor at the Center for the Study for World Religions, Harvard University, USA, Dr Jain has published a number of books on Indian folk art including, Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression in Mithila Painting, Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India and Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World.

A recipient of the Prince Claus Awards in 1998, Dr Jain is an innovator in the field of museology and has conducted extensive ethnographic field research on the folk and tribal religions of Western India. Currently, Dr Jain is the co-editor of Marg Publications, Mumbai.

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She has been the artistic director of her own Theatre Company, The Primetime Theatre Company, for over 25 years and her theatrical work has travelled the globe. Over a span of nearly 40 years, Lillete has played the lead in over 60 theatre productions ranging from Shakespeare, Greek Tragedy, Brecht, Musical Comedies, to Contemporary Drama and Absurd Theatre.

The company aims to showcase original Indian writing and give English theatre in India its own voice, and just completed 25 years with over 3,000 shows across the globe with landmark productions such as Dance Like a Man, 30 Days in September, Sammy, Autobiography, Adhe Adhure, Gauhar and several others. She will open a new play, an operatic montage of the Mahabharata, at the end of 2017.

Lillete has over 40 feature films to her credit including Baghban, Kal Ho Na Ho, Pinjar, Zubeida, Monsoon Wedding and the two Best Exotic Marigold Hotel franchises to name a few. Her upcoming film & TV projects include Indian Summers Part 2 (Season 2), a ten part mini-series for Channel 4, UK and PBS/Masterpiece Theatre, U.K. in which she stars alongside Julie Walters and Roshan Seth.

From a professional family of doctors and engineers, Lillete discovered her passion for theatre and acting in school. Throughout her academic career while studying for her two Masters degrees, in English Literature & Mass Communication, from Lady Shri Ram, and IIMC, Delhi, she continued to pursue her passion for the stage, debuting onstage in productions by TAG helmed by Barry John, the Shakespeare Society of St Stephens College, and YATRIK.

And so started a love affair that burns bright even today.

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The vice-president of World Crafts Council Asia-Pacific Region and the Crafts Council of India, and member of the Indian government’s committee for the selection of master craft persons, Manjari has been coordinating the UNESCO Award of Excellence Programme for South Asia since 2004. She has served on the International Jury for this Award in South East Asia and Central Asia.

She is a member of the Commitment to Kashmir (CtoK) panel that examines business plans of young Kashmiri craftsmen and women to allocate interest-free loans to them in order to begin a small-scale business. The panel also conducts workshops, field visits and individual mentoring for selected applicants.

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Manu’s passion for food surfaced at a young age, thanks largely to a foodie family. Food, the cooking of it, the discussions and arguments around it, and most importantly the celebration of it, were so integral to his family’s normal functioning that it was hardly a surprise when he opted for it professionally.

At St. Stephen’s College, as an under-grad, he wrote, designed and helped photograph a book on fusion cuisine. Manu then enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) Hyde Park, New York, where he apprenticed with some of the City’s most celebrated kitchens, including Restaurant Daniel, Le Bernardin, Gramercy Tavern, Café Centro, Jean Georges and Town and also opened the now legendary Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan.

A lover of slow cooking, Manu leans towards painstakingly controlled and cooked things, a process that enables one to extract flavours and textures. On the flip side, he’s fond of incredibly fast cooking, which keeps the integrity of ingredients and freshness intact. A minimalist, he believes that removing an ingredient rather than adding one usually improves the flavour of a dish.

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Her passion for the written word is the reason she has nine books to her credit. Odette’s first book, Masci: The Man Behind the Legend, which she wrote on her father-in-law, Miguel Arcanjo Mascarenhas, who was the executive chef at Taj Mahal Mumbai in 1939, won a Special Jury Award at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2008.

Her ninth book, The Culinary Heritage of Goa, brings alive the kitchen tradition of Goan households all around the state. She has followed the culinary journey of Goa down the ages, from the times of the Chalukyas, Kadambas, the Vijaynagar Empire, the Muslim Bahamani Sultanate, the Portuguese rulers, to the present times and how it is all reflected in the evolution of Goan Cuisine. The book has won the Best in the World for Historical Recipes and Best Self Published Book in India at the Gourmand World Cookbooks 2015 awards.

She is the co-founder of the Goan Culinary Club – a non-profit venture which strives to preserve the authenticity of Goan cuisine and researches lost recipes of the past with local chefs and restaurateurs.

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He has worked with the Patriot Newspaper, India Today and the Outlook Group of Publications until 2001 after which he has been working independently. Being the co-founder of the Delhi Photo Festival, Prashant has curated all the three editions of the festival, the latest in November 2015. In the same year he conceived and curated the first edition of Sensorium, a festival of arts, literature and ideas for Sunaparanta, the Goa Centre of Arts.

Known for being a mentor, Prashant takes an active interest in advising and guiding younger photographers through Nazar Foundation, which he co-founded.

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His early career saw performances with Louis Banks & the Jazz Yatra Sextet, Pandit Ravi Shankar, the maestros, (late) Don Cherry & (late) Charlie Mariano. Ranjit Barot is today on the forefront of both worlds, the mainstream popular Indian/World music and Jazz fusion genres. He is the musical director for all of A.R. Rahman’s live concerts and is the drummer for guitar legend John Mclaughlin and the 4th Dimension band.

Ranjit has also had a long career in composition and music production, working out of his own studio facility, in Mumbai, India. His strong roots in the Indian classical tradition and his own world‐view of music gave him a unique perspective on the Indian film genre. His career spans projects over the last almost four decades as a featured drummer and arranger for musicians such as R.D. Burman, right up to A.R. Rahman.

Ranjit was the music composer and sound designer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games Delhi 2010, and Music Producer for MTV Unplugged (Season 1 & 2).

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In his role as an art critic, Ranjit has authored a critical biography as well as a major retrospective study of the painter Jehangir Sabavala, and also monographs on the artists Atul Dodiya, Tyeb Mehta, Sudhir Patwardhan, Baiju Parthan, Bharti Kher and Iranna GR.

Having curated his first exhibition when he was 25, Ranjit has conceived and organised twenty exhibitions of contemporary Indian as well as international art since 1994. He was recently co-curator of Former West: Documents, Constellations, Prospects, Berlin, 2013. His other curated projects include, The Needle on the Gauge, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Parkside, 2012; Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode, Indian Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2011.

He has edited the collection Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (2012) and is the author of over 25 books including I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (2011) and Die Ankunft der Vögel (2006), Zones of Assault, The Cartographer’s Apprentice, The Sleepwalker’s Archive, Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 and Central Time.

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