Curators

Shobana P Mathews
Curator for Literature
“Academically speaking, I have a Ph.D. ( Christ -Deemed to be University ) in  Sound and Spatiality Studies. I did my MPhil on the  Folksong as Protest: A Study of the Works of Bob Dylan. This was in 1996 and was twenty years ahead of Dylan being awarded the Nobel in 2016. I have done my UG at WCC, Chennai and my Masters and M Phil from MCC, Chennai. Essentially from Tamil Nadu, I was born and raised in Delhi, Calcutta and mainly Bangalore, where I schooled at the prestigious Bishop Cotton Girls’ High School. While I have had the privilege of the best possible education and professors, I owe a lot of my formation to the lively artistic and academic heritage of my family. My family’s fascinating personal history has also evoked a sense of adventure and a reading heritage.

I never set out to be a teacher and still hesitate to call myself one (my interviews in India Today, The Student Magazine, Campus Diaries or YouTube will substantiate this). I dreamt of a career in the arts, as a classical dancer or painter. I even experimented with advertising for a year.

Having substituted as a lecturer after my masters, I was forever enchanted by the world of words and have stayed in this profession for over 22 years. My research and writing have allowed me to engage with other modes of artistic production, thus keeping alive my love for music, visual art, and dance. Apart from writing for scholarly journals and presenting at conferences, I’m a closet poet and scribble away in a journal, hoping my thoughts will one day translate into a book. Sometimes I wonder how a job can be so much fun…then I remember that to read and talk about reading is my life itself!”

Bhavyaa
Curator for Digital Arts 
Bhavyaa is currently enrolled in the M.F.A Luxury and Fashion Management program at Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah. She graduated from National Institute of Fashion Technology, Mumbai, India in 2014 where she studied Knitwear Design. She has two years of work experience, managing eight in-house brands of India’s first retail store; Shoppers Stop Ltd. She also happens to be an enthusiast for fashion blogging.

Bhavyaa has also been a graduate mentor at Savannah College of Art and Design where she coached students to achieve academic goals and success. Her areas of expertise apart from designing are business development, brand building, strategy, marketing, supply chain management, graphic designing, UX interface, and product development. Lastly, she also happens to be a burn survivor, which has empowered her to empower others.

Sameena Ahmed 
Curator of Fine Arts
Based in Bangalore, Karnataka, Sameena Ahmed, is  largely a self-taught painter. Though always creatively inclined from a young age. She started painting as a hobby along with her corporate career for 24 years.

Sameena had her first solo exhibition called Meraki on 24^th June 2018 at Gallery Manora in Bangalore. The exhibition was well received with great reviews & appreciations. Where some of the paintings were already sold out at the preview itself.

Sameena is also a writer. Hence, each painting has a poetry composition all written by her.

Her paintings  depict pure human characteristics & emotions of love, infatuation, pain, fear, courage, change, peace, beauty, grace, compassion & longing.

Her inspiration comes from colours of nature & textures created by mix media. And that is the basis of her Paintings.

She mostly works with  abstracts & figurative with oil on canvas. Her  work emphasis beauty & deep human emotions in their purity. She uses oil on canvas & does not confine herself to a particular boundary when she is creating & lets herself explore & express deeply.

She is also inclined towards vintage & some of her  paintings capture the essence of old world charm, which represent timelessness & beauty that brings warmth & character, especially giving it an unfinished, uneven surface in the form of texture use.