About Us

Aahiree Banerjee is an arts practitioner, a musician, and a potter who is currently associated with the Disappearing Dialogues Collective as a Project Coordinator. She is a member of a number of cultural organizations and actively partakes in managerial roles for various events.

Aishik is an audio-visual researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He has completed his PhD in musicology from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. His research spans across historical Indian political musicology, ethnomusicology, sound ecology and music sustainability. He is currently studying ritualistic traditions and cultural practices in the Indian Sundarbans. His research advocates for auditory sustainability addressing community and cultural resilience in South Asia. His recent interest in visual ethnography allows him to explore more deeply the human-nature interactions at various place-based contexts and capture the changing  social ecologies of sonic urban palimpsests. He is currently involved in a number of global partnership projects, broadly focusing upon and executing a wide spectrum of visualization techniques to depict and disseminate real-life scenarios from coastal-deltaic contexts.

In the past four years of studying the built environment, Anamika’s inquiries have centered around how our cities work, ranging from urban infrastructure, mobility, gender studies, and climate action. She also dreams of being able to cycle to work and for post-lunch naps to become the norm. Anamika is currently a final-year undergraduate student of architecture at the Jindal School of Art and Architecture, O.P. Jindal Global University.

Hi, I’m Arindam Roy. I am a fresher architect. I obtained my BA degree in Architecture from Om Dayal College of Architecture under Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology in 2023. My passion lies in architecture and design, and I have been striving to make an impact on the built environment by creating innovative designs that are visually appealing yet functional. I have gained valuable knowledge and experience through various internships, competitions, workshops, and research projects. My goal is to become a successful architect with a global presence.

Debarshi Duttagupta is a lawyer by profession and currently serves as the managing director of East India Pharmaceutical Works Limited. However his passion lies in photography and he has been very enthusiastic about photographing extreme weather, specially storms and cloudscapes. He is very concerned about the changing weather patterns worldwide and tries to use the medium of photography to document changes in extreme weather primarily in south Bengal. He has been a member of  the Kolkata Cloud Chasers and has been documenting clouds and storms for over a decade to spread awareness around the changing environment. His works can be found on his social media platforms and his website.

Ar. Debashrita Kundu is a practising conservation architect actively involved in conservation projects across India with organisations such as INTACH, DRONAH, and many more. She is an EPWG Member of ICOMOS India East Zone, demonstrating her dedication to cultural heritage preservation. Her sketch walks have sharpened her architectural talents, and her passions for travel, drawing and writing offer her peace and creative expression.

Debika Banerji is a researcher and a lecturer in geography. She did her M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University and has completed her doctoral degree from Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan focussing on riverscapes. She is interested in cultural landscapes, oral histories and memory mapping. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on fluvial landscapes and on Kolkata’s cultural identities. Her recent book ‘Mosaics of a Locale: Stories of Bhawanipur’ is about mapping the fragments of lost memories of a locality in Kolkata.

Hi I am Gangotri Ganguly, an architect who was born and brought up in Badkulla, a village in Nadia, West Bengal. I completed my schooling in my village and came to Kolkata to pursue my B.Arch degree. I completed my B.Arch degree from Omdayal College Of Architecture. I worked with Mnc.one, Ideation as an intern.Sketching and illustrations are my passion since childhood. Now this passion has become my strength for expressing myself. I also like to perform recitations.

Gautam Chakraborti is the former Security Adviser and Heritage Coordinator of the Port Trust now known as the Syamaprasad Mookerjee Port in Kolkata. He is currently coordinating the Kolkata Port Heritage Initiative and is the Founder CEO of Kolikata-Maritime. He is a heritage enthusiast himself and enjoys associating with activities that enhance the cultural heritage of his city.

Dr. Mohit Kumar Ray has a BSc in Chemical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, a Masters in Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester (UK) and PhD (Engineering) from Jadavpur University He has been working in the field of Environmental Engineering and Management for more than four decades. He has remained in the forefront of environmental activism in Kolkata for the last three decades and has actively campaigned for saving the Adi Ganga and several major water bodies of Kolkata. He has also published a number of papers in technical journals and writes regularly on environmental issues in different journals. Additionally, Mohit Ray has written a number of books on environment in Bengali and English published by reputed publishers.

Nobina Gupta  is a social arts practitioner, researcher and the Founder Director and Curator of Disappearing Dialogues Collective. Over a career spanning 29 years, she has initiated and curated interdisciplinary interactions that engage different communities, institutions and social groups through interactive artworks, heritage mapping, research and documentation. These are collaborative activities that seek to conserve cultural, social and environmental losses, sediments and memories intrinsic to a fragile socio-spatial landscape. An alumnus of Kala Bhavan, Santineketan, and a NET scholar, her works have always been centred around ecology and sustainability. She seeks to raise vital questions – reimagining relationships, creating dialogues between water, waste and wetlands, initiating co-creation and co-production, and breaking norms to disseminate research and community-based grounded learnings, focusing on process, practice and everyday life.

Nyana Naskar is a community artist and an active field member of the Disappearing Dialogues Collective. With her immense traditional knowledge about the wetlands she is a wetlands trails eco-guide and a research assistant for their projects.

Born in Howrah, West Bengal, Palashh Chaturvedi is an alumnus of Banaras Hindu University and the Xavier Institute of Communication. Having a vast and diverse experience across various mediums of communication, Palashh is a communication strategist who integrates everything from digital marketing algorithms to grassroots communication techniques with the purpose of leaving this world a happier place.

Shreyashi is a PhD fellow, at the Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the Science of Happiness, IIT Kharagpur. After completing her Bachelors and Masters in History from Presidency University, she pursued her M.Phil from the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. At present she is working on her doctoral research on the history of the river Adi Ganga and the socio-ecological assemblages surrounding the river.

Siddharth Agarwal has been walking along rivers across India, trying to document and bring stories of marginalised people and the environment into the mainstream. His organisation, Veditum India Foundation (@veditum), hosts some of his work, along with efforts towards environmental research, documentation and accountability initiatives. Siddharth is also a steering committee member at the India Rivers Forum.

Souporni Paul is a practising Landscape Architect and Assistant Professor at GITAM University, Hyderabad. She completed her graduation from Department of Architecture, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and post-graduation in Landscape Architecture from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. She has around 15 years of experience in architecture, interior design, landscape design and master planning projects. Her research interest lies in urban biodiversity, landscape ecology, urban landscape systems, cultural landscape, and urban planning. She has multiple publications in reputed journals and presented in many international conferences. She completed her PhD (Engg.) in 2022 from the Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Jadavpur University.

Subham is currently holding two positions: (1) Research Scientist at the department of Earth Sciences – Physical Geography, Freie Universität Berlin, working in the Einstein Research Unit Climate and Water under Change (CliWaC) project – a trans disciplinary research initiative of the Berlin University Alliance to address water-related risks under climate change, and (2) Joint Berlin-Jerusalem Post-Doctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working on comparative study of water sensitive catchment management between Israel and Germany for mitigating flood risks in coastal urban areas. Subham pursued his PhD on Urban Water Security at the Freie University of Berlin, for which he was awarded the DAAD full scholarship. His PhD project explores the dimensions and issues for quantitative assessment of urban water security in Kolkata.

An architect with a Masters and PhD in Landscape Architecture, Suchandra Bardhan is a professor at the Department of Architecture, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is also the Joint-Coordinator at the Centre for Human Settlement Planning in the same department. Prof. Bardhan has more than two decades of teaching and research experience. Her research interests revolve around water – be it buildings, nature or cultural landscapes. She is a well-published author with a substantial number of scholarly papers to her credit. She has also widely participated in national/ international conferences and presented her work. Prof. Bardhan is associated with prominent academic bodies as an external expert-cum-resource person. She has been a two-time visiting academic under the India Sri Lanka Foundation to the BLA programme, University of Moratuwa. She has worked on major landscape planning and rejuvenation projects on behalf of Jadavpur University, some of which are exhibited here.

Swarnadeep Bhattacharjee is a student of sociology and has completed his graduation and Masters from Jadavpur University. Currently he is working as a researcher under the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences and the Swiss National Science Foundation in collaboration with IIT-Kharagpur. He takes a multidisciplinary approach while looking at social spaces and is interested in areas like political ecology, cultural sociology, economic sociology, computational social sciences and development. He has got experience working with different private and public organizations. Discovering something unknown within and around him is the driving force which motivates him to explore the roads less travelled.

After completion of his Master’s degree in anthropology from Calcutta University, Swarup started research on boats in Bengal boats and their relationship with society. He did research at the Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde, Denmark as a guest scholar and also at the Centre for Maritime Archaeology, Southampton University, UK.
He is presently working with Exeter University, UK as a research associate in a project on Endangered Material Knowledge. He is also associated with the Anthropological Survey of India as a Visiting Fellow. He has been the Curator at the Maulana Azad Museum, a Curatorial Assistant at the Indian Museum, Kolkata, a Project Coordinator of Cultural Research Institute and the Associate Coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, New Delhi. He has taken an active part in the process of development of the Heritage Boats of Bengal Gallery in Kolkata, the Water Transport Gallery of IIT-Kharagpur and the Odisha State Maritime Museum, Cuttack.

Yagnaseni Mitra is currently a freelance editor with Cactus Communications, specialising in psychology and psychosocial healthcare. She is also working as a transcriber and translator for a research project of Newcastle University, as well as a research assistant for a DECCMA project organised by Jadavpur and Northumbria universities.

A thespian, voice artist and one of the first few Dastangos from Kolkata, Zahid Hossain has been a part of several screen and stage productions. Apart from that he also conducts regular theatre workshops in schools and colleges across the country. He also conducts pronunciation (English, Hindi and Urdu) workshops and is an active member of a few theatre groups in Kolkata.