Ashok Vajpeyi, a Hindi poet-critic, translator, editor and culture-activist, is a major cultural figure of India. With more than 14 books of poetry, 10 of criticism in Hindi and 4 books on art in English to his credit, he is widely recognised as an outstanding promoter of culture and an innovative institution-builder. Over the years he has worked tirelessly to enhance the mutual awareness and interaction between Indian and foreign cultures. A frequent presence at some of the major conferences, seminars and poetry-festivals, he has raised his voice for the autonomy of literature and arts as against contemporary tyrannies of ideologies, markets and fundamentalism. As editor of many prestigious journals he has done much to promote critical awareness of contemporary and classical arts and young talent in poetry and criticism. As an organiser he has more than a thousands events to his credit relating to literature, music, dances, theatre, visual arts, folk and tribal arts, cinema etc. He has been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Dayawati Kavi Shekhar Samman, Kabir Samman and awarded D.Lit. (honoriscausa) by the Central University of Hyderabad.

He has written two large books on the Paris-based Indian master Sayed Haider Raza one on 7 contemporary Indian abstract painters a book on Hindustani classical music. He set up the renowned multi-arts centre Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal; has been the first Vice-Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University (set up by Govt. of India). For more than a year he doubled up as the Director General of the National Museum, New Delhi, the Vice-Chairman National Museum of Man, Bhopal. Until recently has been the Chairman, Lalit Kala Akademi, Ministry of Culture, Govt of India, New Delhi.

A prominent public intellectual of India, he has been a creative global-trotter and visited Europe many times to attend conferences, deliver lectures and give readings. Has been a writer in-residence at Jamia Millia Islamia University and a fellow of K K Birla Foundation. He lives in Delhi after retiring from civil service. He has been decorated by the President of Republic of Poland by the outstanding national award ‘The Officer’s Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland’ and the French Govt. by the award of ‘Officier De L’Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres’.

Udayan Vajpeyi born in 1960, is a poet and writer of short-stories, essays and translations. His published works include collections of shorts stories – Sudeshna, Door Desh Ki Gandh, Saatavan Batton; collections of poems - Kuchh Vakya, Pagal Ganitajna ki Kavitayen, Matmailee Smeeti Mein Prashant Samudra (translations of Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa), and Vie Invisible (poems in French translation); essays and conversations - Charkhe Par Barhat, Jangarh Kalam, Patjhar ke Paon ki Menhadi, Abhed Aakash (in conversation with film-maker Mani Kaul) and Mati,Smriti aur Prajna (in conversation with historian, Dharampal). He has translated renowned Indian philosopher Ramachandra Gandhi’s book Sita’s Kitchen, as well as texts of Octavio Paz (Mexico), Borges (Argentina), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Shuntaro Tanikawa (Japan), etc., into Hindi. In addition to the above, Mr. Vajpeyi has edited many magazines and journals; has lectured on the arts and literature in India and abroad; has participated in various poetry festivals, including the Biennale nternational de poetes in Val-de-Maurne (France, 1997), Kavita Shati (Bhopal, 1999), and Marche de la poesie, (Paris, 2008) etc.; has written the scripts for many films such as Mithak Bhanga, Avantikatha, Virah Baryo Ghar Aangan Kaune, Asgari and so on; and has been invited as Writer-in-Residence to Lavigny (Switzerland, 2000) and Les Balles Etrangenres (France, 2002). Mr. Vajpeyi’s poems, short-stories and essays have been translated into several languages including Bengali, Tamil, Oriya, Kannada, English, French, Swedish, Polish, and Bulgarian, amongst others. He is a recipient of the Krishna Baldev Vaid Award (2001) and the Raza Foundation Award (2003). Udayan Vajpeyi lives and works in Bhopal.

Akhilesh, born in 1956, is an artist, curator and writer. He has gained worldwide recognition and appreciation for his works through extensive participation in numerable exhibitions, shows, camps and other activities. Among his thirty-seven solo and thirty-four collective exhibitions, the recent ones include: “Symbols & Merveillies les Coulers de Inde” (Nice, 2009); “Enigmatic Scripture” (Munich, 2010); “Butterfly” curated by Prayag Shukla (Mumbai 2010); “Remnantes of Void” by Manish Pushkale (Australia 2010); “Rang-Leela” (Indore, 2011); at Red Earth Art Gallery (Baroda, 2011); at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes (France, 2011); and Chennai Art Summit (Chennai, 2011). Mr. Akhilesh has also participated in one hundred and thirty-three national and international shows, the first of which was the ‘Inter- State- Art Exchange (Lucknow,1976), and the most recent one was “Contemporaries” (New Delhi 2011); and has been actively involved in a number of art camps, such as the Arts India Artist Camp (New York, 2005 & 2006), Kenya Artist’ Camp (South Africa, 2007), Art Summit Camp (Kolkata, 2008), Bhoruka Foundation Camp (Dubai, 2009); Turkey Artists’ Camp (Istanbul, 2010); and the Raza Foundation Camp (New Delhi, 2011). His works have been displayed in a number of shows curated by renowned curators such as Manjit Bawa, Prayag Shukla, Rm. Palanippan, Renu Modi, Gayatri Sinha, Kalpana Shah, and Manish Pushkale, amongst others. In addition to the above, he has also curated a number of shows, including one for the collection of Bharat Bhavan (Bhopal), and others for Tao Art Gallery (Mumbai), Art Indus Gallery (New Delhi), Aakar Prakar Gallery (Kolkata), Art Today Gallery (New Delhi) and Icon Gallery (USA). He is the founder member of “The Black Group”; has set up a ‘Museum of Police Bands’ at PHQ (Bhopal) and one on ‘Art of Malwa’ at Lal Bagh Palace (Indore); has delivered a lecture at Towson University (USA); has translated Mark Chagal’s autobiography in Hindi; is in the process of writing artist MF Husain’s biography; and has also edited the special issue of SH Raza’s Kala Varta. He has travelled extensively in India and abroad, and his artworks are part of several collections, both privately owned, as well as those belonging to reputed institutions, such as Jawaharlal University (New Delhi), National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi), the Queen of Iran (Iran), Asians’ Art center (USA), Embassy of Switzerland, Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Vidhan Sabha Bhawan (Bhopal), Peabody Museum (Boston), Mr.& Mrs. Chester Herwitz Collection (USA), and so on. Mr. Akhilesh is the recipient of several awards and felicitations in the field of art, including the Kalidas Academy Certificate Award (1976), Bharat Bhawan Biennial (1990), Government of India Senior Artist Fellowship (1994-1995) and Kala Kaustubh Samman (2006). He lives and works in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.

Manish Pushkale (b. 1973) is one of the most highly regarded young painters of India today. He holds a Masters degree in geology from Bhopal. Without any formal training in art but with a powerful and sensitive initiation into it in the evocative environs of Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, Manish has evolved a language of abstraction which carries his own personal imprint. Both his vision and artistic idiom have been growing fast, attaining amazing levels of maturity and significance. While his early training as a geologist is echoed in the organic texturality of his works, the meticulous choice of colors used to layer his works, and his method of applying and wiping off paint tangibly, invoke his complex meditations on asceticism - worldliness, renunciation - sensuality, presence-absence, dying-rebirth and so on. His works are delightful play of formal dichotomies like those of light-shade, mark-erasure, form-formlessness, restraint-excess, control-indulgence, and have matured to a level that confronts and assimilates all these oppositions to achieve a state of refined harmony. Mr. Pushkale has fifteen solo shows to his credit at several prime galleries in and outside the country, and he has participated in almost seven hundred group shows in India and abroad, along with five two-man shows, an idea of jugalbandi between two painters. He is a recipient of the AIFACS Award, the Ministry of Culture’s Junior Research Fellowship, the Artist-in-Residency from the Governments of France and Italy, and the Reliance group, the Kala-Kaustubh Samman, the Spandan Chitrakala Samman and the Raza Foundation Award. He is a Raza Foundation trustee and a member of Garhi Studio selection committee, Ministry of Culture, and a member of the Executive Committee of M.P. Foundation in Delhi. Mr. Pushkale has established “Vaid Samman” an annual award in the honour of Shri K.B. Vaid, a legendary fiction writer of Hindi. This award has already been conferred upon Shri Dhruv Shukla, Shri Uday Prakash and Shri Anupam Misra for their contribution to Hindi literature. Manish Pushkale lives and works in Delhi.

Roobina Karode is the Director & Chief Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, India, since it opened its doors in 2010. She as an educator and writer with post-graduate specializations in Art History and in Education. She has over the years emerged as one of the leading curators in India with her numerous exhibitions at KNMA, India and abroad, including the Indian Pavilion at the 58^th Venice Biennale. 2019. She has focused on the art of under-represented intergenerational artists with extraordinary vision and highly individual practices, and whose contribution has been crucial within the discourse of modern and contemporary Indian art. Roobina is steering a rigorous program  at KNMA focused on collaborations and partnering with other significant institutions to consolidate the global presence and relevance of contemporary Indian and South East Asian art.

Atul Dodiya Born in Bombay, India on January 20, 1959, to a family that had migrated to the west-coast metropolis from Kathiawar in Gujarat, Atul Dodiya is one of India’s most acclaimed postcolonial artist who refuses to confine himself to a box neatly labelled with a national identity; his location in India serves him as a base from which to intervene in a variety of cultural and political histories to which the postcolonial self is heir.

Atul Dodiya’s paintings, assemblages and sculpture-installations embody a passionate, sophisticated response to the sense of crisis he feels, as an artist and as a citizen, in a transitional society damaged by the continuing asymmetries of capital yet enthused by the transformative energies of globalization.

Importantly, through the late 1990s, Dodiya revitalized the painted surface by responding to the challenges posed by new mediatic structure such as satellite television and the internet on the one hand, and by new artistic modes such as video, assemblage and installation on the other. He began to construct his paintings as argument, allegories, riddles, or aphorisms. In so re-engineering the machinery of the painting, he brought a gamut of unpredictable and mutually unrelated energies to bear on pictorial space: his corpus of references soon grew to include poems, comic strips, traders’ lists of wares, advertising billboards, movie posters, cinema stills, popular religious oleographs, and streetside graffiti, as well as his favorite paintings from the postcolonial Indian, Mughal, European and American traditions By 1999, Dodiya’s transformation was complete. He was far more readily identified with a flamboyantly hybrid idiom in which the distinctions between classical and demotic, regional and international, beaux arts and popular culture, had not simply been blurred but actively broken down in the interests of a fictive, sparking, idiosyncratic collage of impulses.

Mohi Baha'ud-din Dagar Born into the illustrious Dagar family of Dhrupad musicians in 1970, Mohi Baha'ud-din first began his foray into Indian Classical Music at the early age of seven, training on the Sitar under the expert tutelage of his mother, Smt. Pramila Dagar.

After completing three years of initial training, he received brief instruction on the Surbahar and was later introduced to the Rudra Veena by his father, Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, a legendary Rudra Veena maestro and his uncle, Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar, a renowned Indian classical vocalist from whom he later also learnt vocal music.

In 1990, Mohi Baha’ud-din received the Lakhanpal Foundation Fellowship for two years. He also received a two-year Fellowship in 1993 from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India. At the early age of 20, Mohi Baha’ud-din formally stepped onto the stage and made his mark in the industry as a classical performer. 

Mohi Baha'ud-din is a unique artist who has played for diverse and varied audiences in India and across the world. A cross-platform performer, he has made regular appearances on television and radio networks. His music has been recorded by Music Today (India), Makars (France), Ragini Sutra (India), Sense World (London), and India Music Archives (USA).

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry has a Master’s degree in the History of Arts as well as a diploma from the National School of Drama.  In 1979, she moved to Bhopal and was attached to The Rang Mandal, a theatre repertory attached to the Multi-arts Complex, Bharat Bhavan. In 1984, she moved to Chandigarh where she set up her own theatre company called ‘The Company.’ Alongside the Company, she has also been teaching in the Department of Indian Theatre, Panjab University and was also the Chairperson.  Her well-known plays include Kitchen Katha, The Suit, Yerma,  Nagamandala  The Mad Woman of Chaillot,   Little Eyolf, Bitter Fruit , Naked Voices, Gumm Hai and Black Box  to name a few . The group has participated in major national and international festival.    Dr. Chowdhry is the recipient of several awards including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2003, and the  Padma Shri (2011) . She is presently Professor Emeritus at the Panjab University.

Arun Vadehra, A graduate in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi, Arun Vadehra was already established in the construction business when he decided to open Vadehra Art Gallery (VAG) in Delhi in 1987, at a time in India when art was not taken seriously by the public-at-large. The Gallery, driven by his vision and commitment to the arts, has come a long way since then and is amongst the most well respected names in the Indian art scene.

Over the past 25 years, VAG has promoted contemporary Indian and international art through exhibitions, retrospectives, publications and educational programmes, and has become the locus through which the works of both modern and contemporary artists reach the public. With two gallery spaces and an art bookstore/reading room in Delhi, as well as a partner gallery in London, VAG promotes a range of artists, from the most senior to young emerging talent.

Having worked with some of the finest contemporary Indian artists over the years, since 2006, VAG has been broadening its programme to hold exhibitions by international artists. Exhibitions of established artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Yoko Ono and Wolfgang Laib have been held at the Gallery. Its goal is to be a vibrant art institution that brings audiences here in contact with the best of contemporary art from within and outside India.

Vadehra Art Gallery was the first to enter into collaboration with the Government, via the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), to hold retrospectives of living Indian artists such as  MF Husain, Raghu Rai, Devyani Krishna, Ram Kumar, A Ramachandran, Tyeb Mehta, SH Raza, and most recently the major exhibition of Atul Dodiya in 2013, and has co-published books and catalogues with them. It has equally collaborated with international museums like Guggenheim Museum, Kunstmuseum Bern; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Serpentine Gallery, London; Chicago Cultural Centre; Singapore Art Museum; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern and Centre Pompidou, Paris, lending works and support towards several exhibitions of contemporary Indian art held abroad.

Arun Vadehra’s sustained efforts in bringing Indian art to the notice of the international art market led to Christie’s holding regular auctions of modern Indian art starting in 1995. As the consultant to Christie’s for Indian contemporary art, he has been actively involved in organizing annual auctions in London, New York, Dubai, Hong Kong, and most recently Mumbai, among other cities.

Sadanand Menon, explores the charged space linking politics and culture through his work in media, pedagogy and the arts. Besides the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, where he has been teaching the 'Arts & Culture Journalism’ elective since its inception in 2000, he is also Adjunct Faculty at IIT-Madras; and at Presidency University, Kolkata. He has been an arts editor, columnist and photographer in the mainstream media as well as in critical alternate spaces. A long-time collaborator with legendary dancer/choreographer/writer Chandralekha, he is also a leading stage lights designer. He curated the definitive retrospective exhibition of artist/designer/photographer Dashrath Patel for the NGMA, Delhi and Mumbai, in 1998/99. He has been on the Advisory/Executive Committees of the National Museum, National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, National School of Drama, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, the Board for Intangible Cultural Heritage, Gati Dance Foundation, Delhi and Dakshinchitra, Chennai. Alongside Romila Thapar and A.G.Noorani, he has an essay in the book 'On Nationalism' (Aleph, 2016). He is a recipient of the Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi's prestigious 'Kesari Balakrishna Pillai' Award for cultural criticism. He is managing trustee of the Arts Foundation, SPACES, Chennai.

Prerana Shrimali, a senior dancer of the Jaipur gharana of Kathak, received her training in dance from Guru Shri Kundanlal Gangani. Having mastered the complexities of the Jaipur style with her grace, innovativeness and imagination, she ranks amongst the most illustrious and reputed classical dancers of India today. Equally competent in pure dance (nritta) and abhinaya (expression), Ms. Shrimali has endeavoured to expand her Kathak repertoire by choreographing new and highly acclaimed compositions based on poetry, ancient, medieval, and modern; and by exploring verses of Kalidas, Amaru, Meera, Kabir, Padmakar, Ghalib, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, and others. She fuses lyricism in virtuosity, blends expressiveness with new insights, invents new gestures, and intensifies her abhinaya with subtle imagination. She firmly believes in the open-ended possibilities that Kathak offers, particularly of new and complex experiments within the tradition, and also believes that experiments must not be ephemeral but should survive in tradition itself. Widely travelled both in India and abroad, she has featured in all the major dance festivals in India, such as at Khajuraho and in many international festivals, such as Festival D’Avignon, France. She taught Kathak in Delhi for many years; has written on ‘Kathak and Abstraction’ for which she got a Senior Fellowship from the Government of India; and has worked as the Repertory Chief of Kathak Kendra, Delhi, for two years. She is a recipient of the Rajasthan Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1993) and the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (2010). Prerana Shrimali lives and works in Delhi.

Ranjit Hoskote, is a cultural theorist, independent curator and poet. He is the author of nineteen books, which include five volumes of poetry; most recently, Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Delhi: Penguin, 2006) and Die Ankunft der Vögel (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006). Mr. Hoskote has also authored nine monographs on art and artists, some of which are Bharti Kher (New York: Jack Shainman Gallery, 2007), The Crafting of Reality: Sudhir Patwardhan, Drawings (Bombay: The Guild, 2008), and most recently, Zinny and Maidagen:Compartment/ Das Abteil (Frankfurt: Museum fur Moderne Kunst/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2010) . He has collaborated on an artist book called Pale Ancestors (Bombay: Bodhi Art, 2008) with Atul Dodiya. He has co-authored a critical history of cultural confluence, Kampfabsage (München: Random House/ Blessing Verlag, 2007); and has curated twenty-one exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, including a mid-career retrospective of Atul Dodiya (Japan Foundation, Tokyo, 2001) and a lifetime retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala (National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay and New Delhi, 2005-2006), and so on. Mr. Hoskote was co-curator of the trans-Asian collaborative curatorial project, ‘Under Construction’ (Japan Foundation, Tokyo and other Asian venues, 2001-2002), and of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (Korea, 2008) with artistic director Okwui Enwezor. He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (1995) and Writer-in-Residence at Villa Waldberta, München (2003). His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. As General Secretary of the PEN All-India Centre, he has also been a vocal and articulate defender of cultural and artistic freedoms, and the rights of embattled minority groups, and was appointed Commissioner for India’s first ever national pavilion for the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Ranjit Hoskote lives and works in Mumbai, Maharashtra.