Madhusree Dutta

Dutta is a filmmaker, a curator and pedagogue with a background in theatre direction, visual arts, and arts publications. Since 2018, she is Artistic Director at the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World), Cologne. Across her practice, she has been an advocator for labour and feminist movements, activism against communalism, and the democratisation of art practices. Her various works explore cultural literacy, art pedagogy, the interfaces between genres, movements and disciplines. She founded and was executive director of Majlis in Mumbai, a centre for rights discourse and multi-disciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai, India, and in 2014, was one of the curators of the Artists’ Cinema programme at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

 

Dutta also founded/directed a major curatorial initiative: Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices (2008 – 2012). This project engaged a wide range of established and emerging filmmakers, curators and cultural stakeholders responding to the relationship that Mumbai has to cinema and the city. The interdisciplinary project was presented in different venues, such as: 60th anniversary of the Berlinale, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, India to celebrate 100 years of Indian cinema, at Film and Television Institute (FTII). Project Cinema City explored the production strategies, labour structure, viewing conventions and materiality of cinema highlighting the inseparable relation between cinema and the city.