Experts
Mumbai
Anchal has 32 years of entrepreneurial, advisory and academic experience in creative and lifestyle industries. Anchal has been working on strategy foundation for top business groups in India such as Titan Co and Aditya Birla Group. He is a member of the FICCI Skills Development Committee as well as the Task Force on Cluster based model of job creation. He is now the founding partner of Val-More Action Advisory, a holistic end-to-end business solution for Lifestyle and FMCG businesses.
Archana spent a decade studying in the arts and design area, and then worked as a Design Researcher at Microsoft Research India. She is a Fellow of the prestigious Clore Leadership Progam, UK as well as an Art Think South Asia Fellow. The Times of India selected her as a future cultural leader of Bangalore. Time Out featured her as a prime contributor to the city’s cultural landscape. Through Jaaga, Archana invests in the cultural economy of India.
Nishant has academic expertise in fields such as Digital Humanities, Computer-Human Interaction and Information and Communication Technologies for Development. He conducts work on the cutting edge of technology, identity and social and political movements. He is focused on the question of how we can remain human in a technological environment. He has dozens of publications to his name.
Padmini (PhD, Edinburgh) founded Design Beku (designbeku.in) in 2018, a collective that works towards making design and technology local, decolonial and ethical. While in the UK, Padmini (along with Peggy Hughes & Claire Stewart) founded and ran The Electric Bookshop (www.electricbookshop.org) a very successful quarterly event hosted by New Media Scotland (2010-2014) exploring the future of the written word, creativity and technology.
She was a lead researcher for the Consortium for Research into the Arts, and Technology in Scotland, funded by NESTA UK, to understand the potential offered by digital technologies in the creative industries, including theatre, tourism & cultural heritage. Padmini joined the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2015, where she established the first Masters programme in Digital Humanities in India.
Professor, IDC IIT Bombay
Professor Venkatesh Rajamanickam is a faculty member at The Information Design Lab at IDC, IIT Bombay, where theory-based visual design and analytical methods are used to discover and validate insights from data, and translate them into systems, methods, and frameworks that help in mindfully created human-information interactions.
Professor Venkatesh Rajamanickam teaches courses on Knowledge Organisation and Communication, Interface Design, Art and Design Fundamental 2D and Information Graphics and Visualisation. He completed his Bachelor of Architecture from R.E.C. Tiruchirappalli and his Master of Design and Visual Communications from IIT. He is in interested in Human-Computer interface design, data visualization, technology and learning, design history and affordable housing.
Rashmi Dhanwani is the Founder of the Art X Company, a strategic consultancy for the cultural sector focused on strategy, audience development and sector research. Prior to founding Art X, Rashmi has worked with NCPA Mumbai, Breakthrough in Delhi, the newspaper Daily News and Analysis (DNA); Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, and The Goa Project. She holds a Masters in Cultural and Creative Industries from King’s College London. She has also been a recipient of the ARThink South Asia Fellowship (2011-12), a participant fellow at ‘The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute’, a scholarship grantee of the JN Tata Trust and Charles Wallace India Trust, and a 2017 Global Fellow of the International Society for Performing Arts (ISPA), New York. Rashmi has also founded Arts Culture Resources India, a network and platform for cultural professionals in India and South Asia.