India Foundation for the Arts
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The India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) is an independent, non-profit organization that supports arts and cultural projects in India through funding and implementation. Established as a public trust in 1993,[1] its headquarters is in Bangalore and has supported over 850 projects.[2] Anmol Vellani, the founding director, previously worked with the Ford Foundation, a private American foundation.
In 2018, the IFA established the IFA Archive, a dedicated repository for preserving materials from its associated projects. The IFA Archive comprises digital materials from over 500 projects and physical collections from over 700 projects, accessible by appointment in Bangalore.
Management
[edit]The Founder Director, Anmol Vellani, is a professional in arts management and organized philanthropy. He served as the founding director until 2013, succeeded by Arundhati Ghosh. In June 2023, Menaka Rodriguez assumed the role of Executive Director.
Constituted on a national basis, the Board of Trustees holds primary responsibility for the growth and sustenance of IFA. The Trustees help determine management policies and program goals and bring significant experience in diverse fields.
Programs
[edit]IFA offers programs that provide assistance and encourage diverse perspectives and directions in the arts, with an emphasis on work in Indian languages other than English.
The Arts Research program engages scholars, researchers, and practitioners to research various histories and expressions of artistic practices in India, fostering wider perspectives, understandings, interpretations, and engagements in the arts.
The Arts Practice program seeks to implement projects that enable artists to expand their present range of practices in new directions, such as questioning accepted conventions, pushing new frontiers in content, form, and medium, exploring new modes of engagement with space, audience, and communities, and foregrounding a spirit of experimentation. The program implements projects under the following categories:
- Explorations
- Productions
- Workshops/ Residencies
- Arts Platforms
The Arts Education program commenced in 1998-99 with the aim of fostering lifelong learning in students through engagement with the arts. The program was reviewed in 2008-09, and the recommendations led to Kali-Kalisu ('learn and teach' in Kannada), an arts-based teacher training programme for government school teachers across the length and breadth of Karnataka[3]. IFA maintains a continuous dialogue with the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the Directorate of Public Instruction, Karnataka, and the Department of State Education, Research and Training, Karnataka to intensify its capacity-building program.
The Archives and Museums program has a twofold objective: to provide arts practitioners and researchers with an opportunity to generate new, critical, and creative approaches for public engagement with archives and museum collections and to energize these spaces as platforms for dialogue and discourse.[4]
Board of Trustees
[edit]- Ajai Kumar Singh, Civil Service, Bangalore, is the Chairperson
- Alok Rai, Language and Literature, Allahabad
- Aparna Sinha, Advertising and Market Research, Kolkata
- Arti Kirloskar, Art and Industry, Pune
- Lakshmi Subramanian, History and Culture, Goa
- Nandita Palchoudhuri, Crafts, Kolkata
- Navtej S Johar, Dance, New Delhi
- S Subramaniam, Finance, Bangalore
- Saajan Poovayya, Law, Bangalore
- Sobha Nambisan, Civil Service, Bangalore
- Vivek Shanbhag, Language and Literature, Bangalore
External links
[edit]- IFA website
- 70-plus projects on arts research in focus, Deccan Herald, 25 October 2024
- Mapping the journey from Bangalore to Bengaluru, The New Indian Express, 09 September 2024
- Project 560 attempts preservation through art, The Hindu, 30 July 2024
- How Kathak impacted the picturization of song and dance in Hindi cinema, The Hindu, 29 July 2024
- Beyond Raja Deen Dayal: The Pioneering Photography of Ramchandra Rao and Pratap Rao of Indore, The Wire, 27 July 2024
- IFA launches heritage project in Kashmir, Greater Kashmir, 13 May 2024
- All the world's a stage, quite literally, HT Brunch, 27 July 2014 Archived 12 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine
- For the sense of seamless perspective, The Hindu, 23 July 2014
- http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/J5D60o7E2vLURRgDoC2ZMJ/Why-we-dont-value-our-arts-enough.html Why we don't value our arts enough, 17 August 2013
- Chronicles of Bangalore retold, 6 June 2014
- [1] Guerrilla Art, Business Standard, 8 March 2014
Notes
[edit]- ^ "India Foundation for the Arts".
- ^ "India Foundation for the Arts". Khoj International Artists' Association. Retrieved 14 November 2024.
- ^ "Kali-Kalisu | India Foundation for the Arts". indiaifa.org. Retrieved 22 April 2025.
- ^ "Programmes | India Foundation for the Arts". indiaifa.org. Retrieved 30 December 2024.
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