Author

Soumik Nandy Majumdar, a faculty member in the Department of History of Art at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, has been teaching the history of Indian and East Asian art for the last 25 years. He has graduated from Santiniketan and completed his Masters from Baroda. He has done his Doctoral research on visual literacy of children and continues to conduct workshops on the subject. Majumdar has published several essays in national and international journals, written exhibition catalogues for prominent artists, including Ganesh Haloi, Jogen Chowdhury, Rafiqun Nabi (Bangladesh), Goutam Chowdhury, Jayashree Chakravarty and Debnath Basu. Besides English, he writes regularly in Bangla as well. Significant shows curated by him include 8 Bengal Masters: Miracles Of Existence, on behalf of Akar Prakar at Musee des Arts Asiatiques de Nice, Nice, France, May 2015; Compelling Presence – Jogen Choudhury Retrospective Show at NGMA, Bengaluru; and Jogen Chowdhury Show at Kalakriti, Hyderabad in 2016. He is visiting faculty at reputed institutes including NID (Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Vijayawada), IIT - Kanpur, FTII - Pune, SRFTI - Kolkata, and lectures at various other art and design institutions and schools.

Dr Shikha Jain has worked on several nomination dossiers for India and other Asian countries. She was Member Secretary of the Advisory Committee on World Heritage Matters to the Ministry of Culture, India, from 2011–15, during its elected term in the World Heritage Committee. Dr Jain has worked as a consultant to UNESCO New Delhi on specific missions. She is currently Vice President for ICOFORT, ICOMOS; UNESCO Visiting Faculty at the Category 2 Centre, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun; Haryana State Convener of INTACH and Founder Director, DRONAH, leading a diverse range of conservation, world heritage and museum planning projects across India and Southeast Asia in more than two decades of her practice, including preparation of Conservation Master Plan of Gandhi Bhawan in Chandigarh. She has a post-graduate degree in Community Design and Preservation from Kansas University, USA, and a doctorate in architectural history from De Montfort University, UK.

Vikramajit Ram trained at the National Institute of Design and is an independent designer and writer based in Bangalore. His photographs of architecture and sculpture have illustrated various publications including the Crafts Council of India’s two-volume documentation, Stone Crafts of India.

Yatin Pandya, a practising architect, scholar and academician, has been actively involved in architectural research as associate director of the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Studies and Research in Environmental Design, in Ahmedabad. He is also a visiting faculty member at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT). Pandya obtained his M. Arch from McGill University, Canada, and is the recipient of several national and international awards for architectural pursuits. He has authored various publications and articles for architectural journals on design theory, habitat design, urban design and urban planning.

Born in the United Kingdom, Shaun Fynn is a designer and photographer who now resides in New York. A graduate of Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London, he is the CEO and Creative Director of StudioFYNN, a New York-based design and communication agency. Over the last 25 years, he has lived in and developed his practice in the UK, Italy, India and the United States.

Fynn’s award-winning work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center in New York and the Weserburg museum in Germany. It has been also published in The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Guardian (UK), Graphis, The International Design Yearbook, Harper Collins Design Now, The Los Angeles Times and the Repertorio Del Design Italiano 1950–2000.

He is also a visiting lecturer at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

 

Sabeena Gadihoke teaches Video and Television Production at the Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia University in New Delhi. She is also an independent documentary filmmaker and cameraperson. Gadihoke graduated in History from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University and did a Masters in Mass Communication at Jamia University. Her film Three Women and a Camera was awarded prizes at Film South Asia at Kathmandu (1999) and at the Mumbai International film festival (2000). She was a Fulbright Fellow during 1995–96 and has received grants from India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore and the Charles Wallace Trust, U.K. for her research on photography.

Ruturaj Parikh is a partner with MATTER, an architecture, design and publishing studio based in Goa, which he founded in 2014 with Maanasi Hattangadi. He is the former Director of the Charles Correa Foundation where he led urban and public projects and research in human settlements. He has been involved in social projects that include listing and grading heritage buildings, redevelopment of backward and informal settlements and low-cost housing. From 2010 till 2014, Parikh was editor at Indian Architect & Builder magazine.

Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based architect, writer and artist. Recipient of several awards for his buildings, Bhatia has also published books on architecture and satire. Besides a biography on Laurie Baker, Bhatia is the author of Punjabi Baroque, Silent Spaces and Malaria Dreams—a trilogy that focuses on the cultural and social aspects of architecture. Among his other books are The Punchtantra, a rewriting of the original Panchatantra into contemporary folk tales, Comic Century, An Unreliable History of the 20th Century, Whitewash: The tabloid that is about the India that isn’t and Lie, a graphic novel, the result of collaboration with miniaturists. His drawings and sculptures have been displayed in galleries in India and abroad.

Dr. Geeti Sen is a cultural historian, professor, art critic and editor, trained at the Universities of Chicago and Calcutta. She is a prominent figure in the Indian cultural world and has been invited to lecture in many parts of the world: United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, Ireland, France, Spain, Brazil and Russia. In the 1970s, Sen was the art critic for The Times of India in Bombay and the Assistant Editor at Marg, the prestigious art journal from Mumbai. Later, she served for two years as the art critic for India Today, Delhi. From 1990 to 2006, she was appointed the Chief Editor of publications at the India International Centre in New Delhi. In 2009, she was selected by the Government of India as the first Director of the Indian Cultural Centre in Kathmandu, Nepal, serving until 2013.

Sen is the author of several books, including Your History Gets in the Way of My Memory (2012), Feminine Fables: Imaging the Indian Woman in Painting, Photography and Cinema (Mapin, 2002), Revelations: Ganesh Pyne (2000), Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision (1997), Image and Imagination (Mapin, 1992) and Paintings from the Akbar Nama: A Visual Chronicle of Mughal India (1984). Each of these books interprets art with an interdisciplinary approach, integrating art with the wider concerns of ethics and social values in India. Sen is the recipient of several awards including the Smithsonian Fellowship, the Homi Bhabha Fellowship, the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, a grant from the Asian Cultural Council in New York, and was selected as the Asian art critic for the Sao Paolo Biennale in Brazil in the year 2000.

Dr. Balkrishna Doshi is foremost among the modern Indian architects. An urban planner and educator for the past 70 years, Dr. Doshi is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Architects. After initial studies at the JJ School of Architecture, Bombay, Doshi worked for four years with Le Corbusier in Paris as Senior Designer (1951–1954) and four years in India to supervise his projects in Ahmedabad. Doshi’s office Vastu-Shilpa (Environmental Design) was established in 1955. Doshi has to his credit outstanding projects ranging from dozens of townships and several educational campuses, including those for CEPT University, Ahmedabad, NIFT, New Delhi, and IIM Bangalore.

Apart from his international fame as an architect, Doshi is equally known as an educator and institution builder. He has been the first Founder–Director of School of Architecture (1962–72) and School of Planning (1972–79), Ahmedabad, which are regarded as the pioneer and fountainhead of modern architectural and planning education in India. 

In 2018, Doshi was selected as the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate, internationally known as architecture’s highest honour. The Jury Citation states, in part, that Doshi “constantly demonstrates that all good architecture and urban planning must not only unite purpose and structure but must…go beyond the functional to connect with the human spirit through poetic and philosophical underpinnings.”

John Guy is the Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of the Arts of South and Southeast Asia at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He formerly served as Senior Curator of Indian art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has curated numerous international exhibitions and is widely published in journals and collected volumes. His major books include Art and Independence: Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style (Mapin, 2019), Indian Art and Connoisseurship (ed. 1995), Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition (1997), Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (1998, repr. 2009), Indian Temple Sculpture (2007, repr. 2017), Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India (2011), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (co-author 2013), and Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (2014).