Panel discussion - Women: a Graceful Pursuit of Freedom & Dignity
Panel Discussion around films: Pink Sarees, Beyond Grace, Motorbike, and Two Steps Forward.
Moderator: Anupama Arora
Panelist: Manjari Sharma, Sunita Mukhi, Sethu Nair, Ashoke Vishwanathan
Panelist: Manjari Sharma, Sunita Mukhi, Sethu Nair, Ashoke Vishwanathan
Moderator/Panelist Bio:
- Anupama Arora (Moderator) is an Assistant Professor of English and an Affiliate of Women’s Studies at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. Her area of specialization is Postcolonial literature. She has taught courses on Indian literature and film, African literature, Black British literature, and Asian American literature. She was the recipient of the 2011 Provost’s Best Practices Award for Innovative Teaching and Learning with Technology at UMass-Dartmouth. She has published and presented on South Asian literary and cultural texts, and her essays on diasporic South Asian women filmmakers Nisha Ganatra and Gurinder Chadha have appeared in the prestigious scholarly journals South Asian Popular Culture and The Journal of Postcolonial Writing respectively.
- Manjari Sharma (Panelist) is a photographer based in New York City. Rooted in the study of relationships and personal mythology Manjari’s work has been recognized as walking the line of fine art and traditional portraiture. Manjari grew up in Mumbai, India and before moving to the US she worked for her national news daily The Times of India as a photo journalist and a leading south asian photo magazine called Better Photography. She holds a bachelors degree in Visual Communication from S.N.D.T University, Mumbai and a BFA in photography from Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. She lives in Brooklyn and is represented by the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM and Paul Kopeikin in Los Angeles.In the past few years Manjari ’s work has been showcased in several group and solo exhibitions both in the US and internationally. In addition to the Critical Mass 2010 show ‘Across the divide’ her work has been exhibited at Nudage an International group exposition in Spain, The Photographic Centre North West, Seattle, Kris Graves Projects in Brooklyn, NY and at the Center for Fine Art Photography,Fort Collins, Colorado. Manjari has had a solo show of her work “Paani” at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles 2011 and also with Richard Levy Gallery in Alburqurque, NM in Fall 2010.
Manjari uses her vulnerability and experience of culture shock to inform and enhance her image making process. She is constantly seeking out new contexts and stories to commit to film. She has shot extensively in the US, India and Brazil exploring the mythologies of these places and the people that inhabit those lands. - Sunita Mukhi, Ph.D. (Panelist) is a cultural producer, professor, theater artist and performance scholar. Currently, as the the Director of Program for the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University, she produces innovative programs which promote a multifaceted, intellectually rigorous and insightful understanding of Asianness. As part of the faculty in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, she has formulated courses on Asian American Contemporary Performance, Indian Cinema(s) and an internship on Presenting Asian American Programs. Her book Doing The Desi Thing: Performing Indianness in New York City was published by Routeledge, and her latest poetry blog appears as Both Beautiful on the internet. She continues to compose dramatic pieces and tells stories, moderates and participates in panels and speaks about the politics of representation, cultural identity, performance, and the South Asian Diaspora.
- Sethu Nair (Panelist) is the Outreach and Media Advocate at Sakhi for South Asian Women. Sethu has been an active and involved member of the South Asian community in New York City ; which includes her various experiences with Sakhi in a volunteer capacity and her involvement in South Asian cultural organizations in New York . Trained to do International Development work, from The School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, Sethu has worked with various NGO’s in India conducting field research, program evaluation and development on food security and sex trafficking. In New York , Sethu has worked as Press Officer for the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, as Manager of Fundraising at the Coalition for the Homeless. At Sakhi, she manages initiatives designed to increase awareness of violence against women. She enables action towards ending violence against women by having one-on-one conversations, meeting with community groups, training volunteers and by managing relationships with other social justice groups in NYC. She also manages Sakhi’s traditional and social media front. Sethu is fluent in Hindi, Malayalam and Urdu
- Ashoke Viswanathan (Panelist)
http://www.ashokeviswanathan.com/home.html
Ashoke Viswanathan a mathematics graduate from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, is a post graduate in film direction from the Film and Television Institute of India (Pune), having finished his specialization in 1985. Subsequently, he completed a certificate course in video production from the same institute in 1986. Since then, he has been active in both film and video media as a director, screenplay writer, actor and presenter, having directed more than 150 films and television programmes including feature films, documentaries, telefilms, music videos, and teleserials. He has won two National Awards and one International Award. Three of his feature films and one of his short features have been included in the INDIAN PANORAMA sections of IFFI ‘94, 1999, 2001, 2002. His films have been shown at the Commonwealth Film Festival, Manchester, the Pyongyang International Film Festival, the Dhaka International Film Festival, and the Ipswich Film Festival, among others. Viswanathan has represented India at the Cambridge Seminar on contemporary British writing, held at Downing College, Cambridge (1997). He has also been an Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Direction at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute and a Visiting Professor at Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, at the Dept. of Cinema and Theatre, Tufts University, Boston, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, and Dept. of Film Studies, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. He has presented papers and illustrated lectures at Monmouth University, New Jersey, Tisch School of Arts, New York University, and at Downing College, Cambridge.
