Avid Learning in partnership with The U.S. Consulate General, Mumbai and Akshara Centre presents Arcs of a Circle: 12 Artists + 12 Minutes + 12 Performances curated and moderated by poet and writer Rochelle Potkar and co-director, Akshara Centre Nandita Shah. Arcs-of-a-Circle is an artists' residency program. For its maiden year, 12 artists-in-residence from various art forms converge around and converse on women's empowerment. They will present their work which consists of poetry readings, storytelling, screenings, stand-up comedy, dance, and installation art. The evening will include an exclusive reading by poet and journalist, Menka Shivdasani.
Author of The Arithmetic of Breasts and other stories (fiction), Four Degrees of Separation (poetry), and Paper Asylum (prose), Rochelle Potkar is the alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and Charles Wallace Writer’s fellowship, Stirling (2017). Her prose was performed on stages in Iowa and Portland. She is the winner of the 2016 Open Road Review story contest for The leaves of the deodar. Her poem Cellular: P.O.W. was shortlisted for the 2017 Hungry hill competition, Ireland, and Ground up won third place at the David Burland poetry prize 2017. She has read her poetry at a few festivals, recently Lviv International Literature Festival, Ukraine. Her short story Chit Mahal (The Enclave) appeared in the anthology: The Best of Asian Short Stories (TBASS) by Kitaab International. She is the editor of the Goan-Irish anthology, Goa: a garland of poems, with Gabriel Rosenstock. She is also editing Joseph Furtado’s manuscript of prose and poetry. https://rochellepotkar.com.
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Feminist scholar and activist with over 25 years of experience, Dr. Nandita Shah is active in the women’s rights movement for more than two decades, as activist, researcher, gender trainer, and writer. She has co-authored several books, such as: Contingent Workers: Women in Two Industries in Mumbai, and Issues at Stake: Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Women’s Movement in India with Nandita Gandhi. In 1995, she co-founded Akshara Centre, a women’s rights organization based in Mumbai. Akshara Centre works towards mindset change of youth, on one hand, and systems change on the other. Her expertise in building different public-private partnerships have led to institutionalized initiatives with the police and local municipalities, transport authorities for creating safer cities for women. Akshara Centre works with different stakeholders to further the cause of gender justice, and fight gender-based violence locally, nationally, and internationally. She has been on many expert committees including with the Planning Commission on Gender Rights, for drafting women’s policy in Maharashtra. She has represented Akshara on International platforms like UNWomen - Commission of Status of Women, AWID, Feminist Dialogues, Women Deliver, Post Beijing platforms, Habitat III among others. She is on the Civil Society Advisory Group of UNWomen.
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