Festival Curators

Natasha Sharma is a Lead for Public Arts and Design and the co-curator of Govandi Arts Festival at Community Design Agency. At CDA, she works with communities living and working in neglected neighbourhoods to drive social and spatial improvements through the tools of community arts, placemaking and participatory research. She wants to create a space for both dialogue and celebration with different communities, practitioners and government authorities around the idea of home, identity, and inclusivity in city-making. Natasha is also an independent visual artist creating tactile and experiential works of varied scales and materials. Her diverse work has ranged from creating learning environments in metro stations of Bangalore to site-specific interventions in public spaces to replacing advertisement billboards with art in Germany. She was a speaker at Urban Thinkers Campus 2022 (supported by the UN Habitat) and The Global Solutions Summit 2021 (Berlin). She won the Reclaim Art Award (2021), Germany for design and use of public spaces.

Natasha sharma

Bhawna Jaimini is an urban practitioner and writer based in Mumbai. She works with the Community Design Agency as the Lead for Community Development and the Co-Curator of Govandi Arts Festival. Trained as an architect, she works on projects that seek to improve the built habitat of some of the most marginalised communities - using participatory planning, action led research and advocacy. From working with street vendors to nomadic pastoralists, Bhawna has worked with diverse communities in both rural and urban areas of India. She is deeply passionate about gender rights and believes in using architecture and design to address inequities and inequalities in the built environment. When not with communities, she spends her time writing on urban issues for various indian and international publications. She has written for The Quint, Tribune, The Wire, LiveMint, Stir, SheThePeople and others. Her first book, 'The Happiness Guide to City Planning' will be released later this year.

Dee is a participation focused celebratory artist who specialises in the making of large temporary sculpture and giant puppets, concentrating on developing techniques which use wind, gravity and the movement of the body as a sculptural force. She is both a Director of Arts Enlarge CIC and an Associate Member of The Lamplighters and has produced Carnival Arts programmes for over 20 years in the U.K. In 2016 Dee received Artists International development Fund to travel to New York City where she worked alongside Processional Art Workshops researching storytelling through processional arts. As a solo artist, Dee believes in supporting communities to celebrate themselves and reclaim public space, through carnival arts, giant puppetry and simple digital animation.