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

Creative Lead & Curator

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

Community Lead & Organiser

Parveen Shaikh is a social worker and community 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 is currently the President of Navnirman Association, the federation body of Natwar Parekh Colony. Passionate about the rights of women from Muslim and minority communities, she continues to support the women and young girls of her neighbourhood through her work at Community Design Agency and beyond.

Parveen Shaikh

Coordination

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

Coordination

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