Team — Govandi Arts Festival

Homegrown and nurtured since 2022 by dreamers and an artist-architect-social worker trio - Natasha Sharma, Bhawna Jaimini and Parveen Shaikh from Community Design Agency, the team has now grown into a diverse bunch of artists, researchers, architects and community organisers working closely with the residents of Govandi.

Current Team

Festival Co-Founder, Creative Lead & Curator

Natasha Sharma is a Co-founder, Creative Lead & Curator at Govandi Arts Festival. 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.

In recent times, she won UNESCO's Going Together - For Youth Creativity and Wellbeing grant (2025) with the Govandi's youth group, the Arts4Resilience - Knowledge Into Use award (Sweden, 2023), Reclaim Art Award (Germany, 2021) and has been invited to Glastonbury Festival (UK) for their Diversity Artist programme. Her film Gutter Ki Machhli made it as a finalist for Best Indian ShortFilm in All Living Things Environmental Film Festival (ALT EFF) 2024.

Natasha Sharma

Festival Co-Founder, Community Lead & Organiser

Parveen Shaikh is the Co-founder, Community Lead & Organiser with over 20 years of experience in advocacy work for the rights of slum and pavement dwellers. A powerful public speaker, she has championed the cause of safe formal housing for vulnerable communities at multiple national and international forums as a former member of the National Slum Dwellers Federation. She helped set up the Myna Mahila Foundation in 2015, which works on issues of menstrual health in underserved communities, and was the former President of Navnirman Association, the federation body of Natwar Parekh Colony in Govandi.

At CDA, Parveen engages with government stakeholders, mobilizes the Govandi community, and works closely with women and youth to raise awareness on education, health, well-being, and social entitlements. She works to build consensus among the community to support the Arts Festival. Parveen has been shortlisted as a finalist for the 2025 Women Exemplar Award by CII Foundation, through which she is recognised for her work in youth education and empowerment.

Parveen Shaikh

Community Coordinator

Sana Shaikh is an undergraduate commerce student at Mumbai University. She works as a library assistant at Kitaab Mahal and is one of the Community Coordinator for Govandi Arts Festival. She also teaches children the basics of computer literacy at the digital centre run by the Community Design Agency. She wants to become a filmmaker and learns new words by watching English films with subtitles. She enjoys creating mehendi patterns in her free time.

Sana Shaikh

Community Coordinator

Tayyaba is a second year Management Studies student. She works as a library assistant at Kitaab Mahal , a children's library in her neighbourhood. She is also working as a Community Coordinator for Govandi Arts Festival. She started working with the Community Design Agency as a volunteer for Young Sangathan - a youth group formed by young men and women of Natwar Parekh Colony. Having grown up in a conservative and patriarchal household, Tayyaba now feels confident about her abilities to work and firmly believes in having equal access and opportunities for women. She wants to be financially independent and become a banker to support her mother.

Tayyaba Darvesh