India Foundation for the Arts

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) is an independent, nationwide, non-profit organization that grants and implements projects in practice, research, and education in the arts and culture in India. Established as a public trust in 1993 and headquartered in Bangalore, IFA has been involved in over 850 projects. Its founding director, Anmol Vellani, previously worked with the Ford Foundation.

The IFA Archive, launched in 2018, serves as a repository for materials from projects associated with IFA. The digital archive currently includes materials from more than 500 projects, while the physical archive in Bangalore contains resources from over 700 projects, accessible to visitors by appointment.

Management

The Founder Director, Anmol Vellani, is a professional in arts management and organised philanthropy. He has been succeeded by Arundhati Ghosh, also a professional in the arts and organised philanthropy. Menaka Rodriguez is the current Executive Director of the organisation.

Constituted on a national basis, the Board of Trustees holds primary responsibility for the growth and sustenance of IFA. The Trustees are closely involved in determining management policies and programme goals, and bring considerable experience in industry, finance, public affairs, law, communications, the arts and the humanities. They share a common passion for the enrichment of arts and culture.

Programmes

The programmes at IFA respond to demand for assistance, while also giving encouragement to new perspectives and directions in the arts, especially encouraging work in Indian languages other than English.

The Arts Research programme engages scholars, researchers, and practitioners to research various histories and expressions of artistic practices in India. It seeks to foster wider perspectives, understandings, interpretations and engagements in the arts.

The Arts Practice programme seeks to implement projects that enable artists to expand their present range of practices in new directions. These could question accepted conventions, push new frontiers in content, form and medium, explore new modes of engagement with space, audience and communities, foregrounding a spirit of experimentation. The programme implements projects under the following categories:

• Explorations
• Productions
• Workshops/ Residencies
• Arts Platforms

The Arts Education programme is one of the organisation's flagship programmes. It announced itself in 1998-99, with the conviction that it is only through the arts that students and youngsters would inculcate a quest for lifelong learning. The programme was reviewed in 2008-09 and the recommendations from it led to the next avatar of the Arts Education programme that was titled Kali Kalisu (‘learn and teach’ in Kannada). It maintains a continuous dialogue with the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the Directorate of Public Instruction, Karnataka, and the Department of State Education, Research and Training, Karnataka to intensify its capacity building programme.

The Archives and Museums programme has a twofold objective: to provide arts practitioners and researchers with an opportunity to generate new, critical and creative approaches for public engagement with archives and museum collections; and to energise these spaces as platforms for dialogue and discourse.

Board of Trustees

• Ajai Kumar Singh, Civil Service, Bangalore is the Chairperson
• Alok Rai, Language and Literature, Allahabad
• Aparna Sinha, Advertising and Market Research, Kolkata
• Arti Kirloskar, Art and Industry, Pune
• Lakshmi Subramanian, History and Culture, Goa
• Nandita Palchoudhuri, Crafts, Kolkata
• Navtej S Johar, Dance, New Delhi
• S Subramaniam, Finance, Bangalore
• Saajan Poovayya, Law, Bangalore
• Sobha Nambisan, Civil Service, Bangalore
• Vivek Shanbhag, Language and Literature, Bangalore

External links

• IFA website
• Mapping the journey from Bangalore to Bengaluru, The New Indian Express, 09 September 2024
• How Kathak impacted the picturisation of song and dance in Hindi cinema, The Hindu, 29 July 2024
• Beyond Raja Deen Dayal: The Pioneering Photography of Ramchandra Rao and Pratap Rao of Indore, The Wire, 27 July 2024
• All the world's a stage, quite literally, HT Brunch, 27 July 2014 Archived 12 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine
• For the sense of seamless perspective, The Hindu, 23 July 2014
• http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/J5D60o7E2vLURRgDoC2ZMJ/Why-we-dont-value-our-arts-enough.html Why we don’t value our arts enough, 17 August 2013
• Chronicles of Bangalore retold, 6 June 2014
• [1] Guerrilla Art, Business Standard, 8 March 2014