Aman Sethi is a journalist and writer in India. He studied at Delhi University and Asian College of Journalism in India before he received a master degree in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 2009. He now works as the Associate Editor of the Business Standard in India, and his works have covered the 2014 election, the agrarian crisis in western India, as well as the labour unrest in the manufacturing sector, etc.
Chaitanya Sambrani studied Economics (BA Hons)and Art Criticism (MA) at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, India. He taught art history and theory at the K. Raheja Institute for Architecture, Mumbai from 1995-98 before relocating to the Australian National University, Canberra, to undertake a PhD in Art History and Curatorship.
Ravi Sundaram is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. In 2000 he founded CSDS’s Sarai programme along with Ravi Vasudevan, Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Sundaram has co-edited the critically acclaimed Sarai Reader series that includes The Cities of Everyday Life (2002) and Frontiers (2007).
Surabhi Sharma is an independent film maker. She studied film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, and made her first film in 2001. Her films have been screened at various international festivals and have been awarded at Film South Asia, Nepal; Karachi Film Festival, Pakistan; The Festival of Three Continents, Argentina; Indian Documentary Producers’ Association and Eco-cinema, Greece.
Gargi Sen is a filmmaker, distributor and curator. She is a co-founder and director of Magic Lantern Foundation, a registered not-for-profit working with culture and rights since 1989. Sen has directed 22 documentaries, produced 4 and mentored scores. She has curated and also served on the juries of several national and international film festivals.
Rohan Shivkumar is an architect and an urban designer practicing in Mumbai. He is also currently Deputy Director at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies.
Art history, particularly of the Asian pictorial traditions, draws Nilima Sheikh towards the materials, surfaces and formats that could contain her interests. It encourages her to develop dialects to accommodate the lexicons of pre-modern art histories. Whether painting her home and neighbourhood as her children grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, or engaging with the issue of ‘dowry deaths’ while narrating the story, in serial folios, of a young girl who lost her life to the avarice of her marital family, Nilima Sheikh consistently seeks alternative ways of telling.
Gulammohammed Sheikh (b. 1937) is an artist, writer and educationist. For over five decades he has pioneered an engagement with historical forbears and a social and political investment in art practice. As a teacher of art history and painting at the M.S. University of Baroda, and through numerous residencies and publications, he has contributed to a renewed understanding of cross-cultural themes in artistic pedagogy, in an Indian and international context.
It would not be an exaggeration to call Gigi Scaria an ‘archaeologist’ of urban spaces, more particularly in his case that of the city of Delhi, where he has been living now for the better part of a decade. ‘Archaeology’ here refers to the range of methods and techniques deployed by the artist in order to bring to light what has lain hidden; it implies excavation and depth, an attentiveness to the sedimented layers and accretions of historical time, and approaches the city as a palimpsest of traces.
