Martha Chen

Martha Chen is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Senior Advisor of the global network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing. An experienced development practitioner and scholar, her area of specialization is the working poor in the informal economy.

Dr. Chen received a PhD in South Asia Regional Studies from the University of Pennsylvania; and was awarded a Padma Shri by the Government of India.

Deepa Dhanraj

Deepa Dhanraj is a researcher, writer and an independent documentary filmmaker. Her documentaries and writing that span a period of forty years, engage with questions related to women’s status, political participation and resistance. She was one of the founding members of Yugantar, a feminist film collective that made a set of films on the political organizing of women domestic workers and women tobacco factory workers; and for The Oral History Association of India.

She has a special interest in education and she has worked extensively with Government schools to create pedagogy suited for problems faced by first generation learners who come from Dalit and Adivasi communities. She has co-authored the book Rupture, Loss and Living: Minority Women Speak about Post-conflict Life with K. Lalita published by Orient Black Swan. She has contributed papers on gender and development at national and international conferences.

Her films have been screened and awarded at national and international film festivals, and she has also served on the Jury at National and International film festivals.

Dhanraj is currently working on an audiovisual archive of the students anti-caste movement that arose in 2016 post the tragic suicide of the Dalit PhD research scholar Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad.

Ranjit Hoskote

Ranjit Hoskote has been acclaimed as a seminal contributor to Indian art criticism and curatorial practice, and is also a leading Indian poet. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin, 2018; in the UK by Arc as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2020), and Hunchprose (Penguin, 2021). His translation of a celebrated 14^th-century woman mystic has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011).

Hoskote was the curator of India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). He co-curated the 7^th Gwangju Biennale with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim (2008). Among his curatorial projects are three transhistorical exhibitions developed for the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa: Terra Cognita? (2016), Anti-Memoirs (2017), and The Sacred Everyday (2018). With Rahul Mehrotra and Kaiwan Mehta, Hoskote co-curated the exhibition-conference platform, The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India (National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, 2016). He has also curated a retrospective-scale exhibition of M.F. Husain, Horses of the Sun (Mathaf Museum, Doha, 2019) and F.N. Souza: The Power and the Glory (currently on view at CSMVS, Bombay, 2021-22).

Gautam Patel

Gautam Patel began his practice in 1987 in Mumbai, working on commercial, corporate, and civil litigations and appearing in numerous environmental public interest litigations. He was part of the legal team representing the Bombay Environment Action Group (BEAG) in its quest against the privatisation of the Parel Mill lands. In 1994-1995, he received the first international fellowship at Pacific Energy & Resources Center, Sausalito, California in environmental law which entailed course work at the University of Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and an internship with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

He served as the Honorary Secretary of the Bombay Bar Association for two three-year terms (1999-2005), and served on the Association’s Standing Committee till his appointment as a High Court judge. He taught as a part-time lecturer at the Government Law College, Mumbai (2008-2011), and has written widely for newspapers and magazines. Currently, Patel is a sitting judge of the High Court of Bombay in Mumbai.

Michael Sheridan

Michael Sheridan is a filmmaker and educator who has produced documentary and experimental films for local, national, and international humanitarian and cultural organizations. PBS, ABC, National Geographic, TLC, and Discovery have aired Michael’s work as a producer, cameraman and editor. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Cyberarts Festival and many other galleries have exhibited his experimental work. The National Education Media Network, the Columbia International Film and Video Festival, the United Nations Association Film Festival, and EarthVision have screened and awarded his films.

For 25 years Michael has taught filmmaking and has been on the faculty at Northeastern University, MassArt and the former Boston Film and Video Foundation. From 2007-08 he served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia. In 2010 Michael founded Community Supported Film to amplify local voices by training and mentoring storytellers and change-makers in under- and mis- represented communities.