Field of Study India: Visual Arts

Balasubramanian Geetha

Dr. B. Geetha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Her research interests include film history, stardom, comedy studies, film aesthetics, and archival studies within South Asian visual cultures. She was the recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship in Visual Arts at Michigan State University (2022–2023). She also received a travel grant from the UCLA Center for India and South Asia (2023) for her doctoral work on Tamil cinema.

Dr. Geetha’s academic publications have appeared in journals such as Celebrity Studies, South Asian Review, Senses of Cinema, Screen, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Geetha’s work engages with the physical modality of slapstick to theorize the performative possibilities of the comic body in Tamil cinema. This research finds its methodological grounding by drawing on conceptual tools from the fields of film studies and performance studies to examine concerns around embodied caste labor through the gestural registers of the comedian. Overall, the research excavates the comedic strand of thought within the historiography of Indian cinema by studying the aesthetico-ethical stakes of laughter, pain, and film form.

Sameera Jain

Ms. Sameera Jain is a film editor, director and educator. She has an interest in structuring pedagogic practice which pushes the boundaries of the documentary form and interrogates accepted codes around it. She directed the Creative Documentary Course (2013-23) SACAC, New Delhi.

After doing graduation in English literature, Ms. Jain went on to study filmmaking at the Film and TV Institute of India. She has been working in the field of cinema in various capacities for over four decades. Ms. Jain has conducted master classes, participated in film juries, spoken at various forums, and has had retrospectives of her work.

Some of the films Ms. Jain directed are Mera Apna Sheher (My Own City), Portraits of Belonging, Born at Home and If You Pause. She has edited documentaries, experimental shorts, essays, installations, and fiction. Some of the films she has edited are A Season Outside, A Night of Prophecy, The Lightning Testimonies, A Quiet Little Entry, Immoral Daughters, Such a Morning, Soul of Sand, Reaching Silence and Shadows in The Dark. The work has been shown across the world and won several awards.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence (Research) fellowship at UnionDocs, New York, Ms. Jain is exploring the possibilities of pedagogical structures and methods which facilitate exploration of the politics of representation through rigorous study and experimentation, to catalyze and nurture expressions that find their form afresh. In addition, she will work towards a draft of a publication that addresses experimental non-fiction film art pedagogy.

Balasubramanian Geetha

Ms. Balasubramanian Geetha is a Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. She has completed her graduate and postgraduate studies in English Literature from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, and Jamia Millia Islamia, respectively. She has received the GV Subramanyam Award and Nelabhatla Memorial Prize for her academic performance in B.A. (Hons.) English. She is also a gold medallist for her highest academic standing in M.A. English.

Geetha’s doctoral dissertation specifically focuses on the emergence of the hero-star Vijay Sethupathi (VJS) to examine the shifts in the cinematic representations of the hero figure in contemporary Tamil cinema. As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, she intends to formulate an alternative framework of stardom to study the figural possibilities of VJS at the intersection of changes in narrative techniques, aesthetic constitution, and digital technologies. Through the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she plans to engage with this research dimension by gaining infrastructural access to South Asian libraries and archives, audio-visual material, and interacting with a wider intellectual community for expanding her disciplinary knowledge in the field of Cinema Studies.

Geetha’s research interests include Literary Studies, Film and Cultural Studies, Star Studies, and South Asian Popular Culture. She has presented papers at various academic forums such as American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), The Annual Conference on South Asia, and UGC-sponsored national conferences. Her forthcoming book chapter on the anti-caste politics of the Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018) will be published in the anthology titled The Routledge Companion to Caste and Cinema in India (2022).

As a performance poet, Geetha has performed her writing pieces at multiple creative platforms like Poems India, Toronto International Festival of Authors, and Airplane Poetry Movement. She is also the winner of the Delhi Poetry Festival 2015. Further, she has been a part of the theatre group ‘Expressions’ in Jamia Millia Islamia and participated in street plays and proscenium stage performances at the National School of Drama and The Shakespeare Society of India. Finally, her poems have been published in the feminist anthology entitled The Kali Project: Invoking the Goddess Within (2021) and Pixie Dust and All Things Magical (2022).

Priti Samyukta

Dr. Priti Samyukta completed her bachelor’s d egree from JNTU, College of Fine Arts, Hyderabad, in 2001, and her master’s d egree in Fine Arts from the University of Hyderabad in 2003. She received her PhD in the month of July 2021, under the supervision of Dr. P K Khandoba, from Gulbarga University, Karnataka. Her research topic for her PhD, “A comparative study of Batik and Kalamkari paintings – with special reference to Telangana and Andhra Pradesh”, is a compiled work of a historical overview of the two art forms on fabric and its presence in today’s art context. Dr. Samyukta has published several research papers in reputed n ational and i nternational j ournals, and has attended several seminars and conferences. Dr. Samyukta is also a painter. She has attended art camps and participated in several art exhibitions . She has also curated art exhibitions in India and abroad. She has won several awards, like The Hyderabad Art Society Award (2003 & 2009), HYBIZ TV Award (2021), 9th Faculty Branding Award (2021), Karnataka State Govt , and the BV Halabavi Award (2021). Her paintings are with collectors in India and abroad. Presently, Dr. Samyukta is Head, Department of Painting, College of Fine Arts, JNAFA University, Hyderabad.

The topic for her p ostd octoral thesis, “Women in Quilt Art of the Gulf South Region: An Investigation into their contribution to the 21st Century America”, is to look at the historical overview of the American Narrative Quilt women artists and the Gees Bend community of Alabama and their contribution to uphold “quilt” as an art form in today’s American art. Dr. Samyukta would want to introduce, simultaneously, South Indian textiles to the quilt artists, while practicing quilt with them and researching as well. She would finally bring back the nuances of American Quilt Art to Telangana’s Quilters, enlightening them about how quilts of Telangana can be art specific as well.

Sreerupa Bhattacharya

Ms. Sreerupa Bhattacharya is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, Mumbai, where she examines the works of women photographers in twentieth-century India. By tracing a genealogy of women’s photographic practices, her Ph.D. seeks to explore hitherto obscured archives in order to engender the history of photography in India as well as provide fresh insights into the gendered lifeworlds of women in the twentieth century. Her research interests include visual culture, gender studies, technology studies and South Asian history.

Ms. Bhattacharya completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in English literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, where she was awarded the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) for an independent research project on the Jewish community of Kolkata. She was a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University, where she received a postgraduate diploma in liberal studies. She also worked as Teaching Assistant at Ashoka University and IIT Bombay for a range of courses on gender and sexuality, film studies, literary culture and language training.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, she is undertaking archival research, gaining interdisciplinary methodological insights into the study of visual culture, and engaging with a global community of scholars and curators working on gender and photography.

Pampa Panwar

Prof. Pampa Panwar is a Professor at IICD, Indian Institute of Crafts & Design, Jaipur, Rajasthan. Before completing her master’s from Slade School of Fine Art, University College London under Commonwealth Scholarship in 1993, Prof. Panwar earned her MFA from M.S. University, Vadodara and her BFA from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan.

On a French Government Scholarship, Prof. Panwar was artist-in-residence at CAMAC, Centre d’Art, Marnay-sur-Seine, France and she did a Swiss Arts Council’s research residency at Lucerne School of Art & Design, Switzerland. She was also awarded a Senior Fellowship by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. She conceptualized, directed, costume-designed and performed a dance-based video art – Gently, into the other side of time, which received the National Exhibition Award – Senior Category at 29th National Exhibition of Contemporary Art, South Central Zone Cultural Centre, Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof. Panwar aims to explore the importance of contemporary crafts as a continuing narrative with focus on narrative quilts, and how craft has merged into art and vice-versa in the contemporary context of both India and the US. By studying the case of the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama, her project considers the following questions: how have these quilts come to define a community and expression of a culture? Is it possible to apply the classic Indian understanding of nine effective states of Navarasa within an American context? Narrative quilts serve as a lens for exploring these questions. Ultimately, with the help of her research, she plans to develop an inter-disciplinary visual work at her host Institution.

Miriam Chandy Menacherry

Miriam Chandy Menacherry, filmmaker and founder of Filament Pictures, is known for her documentary films which celebrate everyday heroes, such as Stuntmen of Bollywood (2005), Robot Jockey (2007), The Rat Race (2011), Lyari Notes (2015), The Leopard’s Tribe (2022) and From the Shadows (2022). She was a Global Media Makers fellow (instituted by Film Independent) and a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television) India fellow. She is also a masterclass panelist at IFFI on “Indian documentary on the World Stage”.

Miriam has completed her postgraduate degree from the AJK Mass Communication Research Center, New Delhi. Her social documentaries shed light on invisible narratives to construct a complex reality overlooked by mainstream media, and they have been selected at leading film festivals and broadcast worldwide. Her films have also been screened in educational institutes in India and abroad such as IIT Mumbai, Mount Carmel College, AJK Mass Communication Research Center, New York University, the University of Texas at Austin, Oxford University, and SOAS.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence (Research and Teaching) fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin, TX, Miriam is engaging with students of film to develop a dialogue about critically important yet invisible stories from India and expand the scope of her research supported by the India Foundation for the Arts to visibilise the contribution of women in cinema to include parallel developments in Hollywood.