#COVIDHeroes

Alex is at heart a marketing man, who enjoys creating meaningful pitches and brand integrations. He has worked across industries - in digital marketing, e-pharma and healthcare, marketing research and advertising. His areas of study were Disruptive Thinking and Marketing at his alma maters, The Harvard Business School Online (HBX) and Kean University.

With the CPB Foundation, Alex has been instrumental in securing sponsorship and support at the Chennai level and from some renowned Indian and international brands for the second edition of the Biennale (CPB 2019). 

For CPB 2021, he continues to work closely with the core team to bring in meaningful partnerships and relationships to the fold, which will span across CSR, Marketing in brand integrations that will be visible during the 3rd edition of the Biennale.

Aravind is a communication designer from the National Institute of Design, Andhra Pradesh. A Chennai-based designer constantly on the move, his interests lie in all things design, ranging from Graphics and Publication to Event and Exhibition. He also dabbles in photography and videography, and is looking for different forms of storytelling among other things.

At the CPB Foundation, apart from producing social media creatives, his day revolves around feeding and playing with the cats and working on the interface and experience design for CPB’s digital space and events. Sometimes, he does these things all at once.

When he’s not working, he can be found reading, tinkering with a bunch of software, scribbling away to his imagination, working on experimental projects with a cup of coffee, or just heading out on a bike ride for his share of fresh air.

Gayatri is a trained engineer, a photographer, an arts manager and an educator. She had over 7 years of international experience with a leading bank in network infrastructure and business management before she built a 10-year career in the arts. She is currently the founding Trustee of the Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation, and also heads CPB Prism, the children's education wing of the Foundation. She was awarded the ARThink South Asia Fellowship in 2019 which enabled her to work in Germany at the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie.

Her passion for working with children and education led her to build and grow CPB Prism, where she works directly with administrators, teachers and students, to bring visual art learning into curriculums. CPB Prism has spent over 800 hours teaching photography to over 1000+ students since its launch two years ago. 

Students are taught the basics of digital photography and editing using phones which are more accessible than ever before. The resulting works made by a very diverse student body have been exhibited in the Government Museum, on the Chennai beach, a mall, and other urban spaces.

The education program continues to grow and evolve with the Chennai Photo Biennale, which is now getting ready for its third edition in December 2021.

Habiba is a photographer who enjoys capturing and narrating diverse stories and incorporating emotions into different visual media. Her journey with Chennai Photo Biennale entails mentoring and teaching the art of photography through CPB Prism. Being a psychology graduate, understanding people, emotions and everything in between excites her.

She spends most of her time thinking of places to travel and is obsessed with  wildlife, especially blue whales and wild cats. Playing her guitar and singing is her cathartic ritual. She also needs a daily dose of chai to function humanly. To befriend her, give her chocolates.

Nisha freelances as a food & product photographer/recipe developer & content creator in the F&B space. She is an engineer by profession, who loved working in the energy and industrial process sector before building a career in the creative space. Moving abroad gave her the luxury and opportunity to explore her other passions - cooking, writing, and photography, which led to many freelance opportunities and landed a position at Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation.

At CPB, she was responsible for researching and planning monthly programming, managing membership and communications. She loves everything about food and their stories! You can find her mostly in the kitchen trying to whip up something or reading up on culinary anecdotes. She also runs a food blog, The Magic Saucepan.

Priya is an architect based in South India with a deep appreciation for heritage spaces and regionally rooted practices. When she is not hunting for hole-in-the-wall eateries or chasing sunrises up on the hills, she likes to work on building meaningful spaces for people to live in. She is a perpetually confused and clumsy soul, who is always up for a cup of tea.

Her interest in the practice of repurposing abandoned haunts across the city to host beautiful and lively festivals for the world to see is what led her to the CPB Foundation, where she now manages Programming and Communications. She spends a majority of her day reading, researching, and mapping out projects along with curating works and texts.

Ramesh has more than 25 years of experience working as an administrator in various reputed organisations across the country. He has excellent skills in Sales & Marketing, Procurement & Sourcing, Administration & Housekeeping, Employee and Public Relations, Customer Relations & Human Resources.

He has an immense love for cinema and international films, you will always find him running away to catch a film festival. He loves learning new languages and is fluent in most of  South India's languages. He has a deep appreciation for arts and culture, enjoys travelling and loves photography.

At the CPB Foundation, he works as the office administrator and manages everything and everyone. His story telling skills are unparalleled in the office.

Sakshi is an art educator at CPB Prism. She's a wannabe cat lady, and she loves good films, good books and chocolate truffles. She wants to write but doesn't, wants to read but doesn't, wants to draw but doesn't, and wants to study but doesn't.

She's incapable of following to-do lists, and finds being around cats therapeutic. Instead of doing Important Things, she's usually reading trivia she'd never use or picking out names for pets she doesn't have. Her favourite book is To Kill A Mockingbird.

Shuchi Kapoor is a documentary photojournalist from India and a founding member of the Chennai Photo Biennale. She works at the intersections of visual storytelling, research and education, and is deeply curious about regimes of representation and visual cultures. 

Her documentary work focuses on humanistic visual narratives on human rights, environment, politics, the aftermath of communal warfare, refugee life, gender and sexuality, mental health, juvenile and child labour, social & ethnographic cultural practices and more, spanning across regions, cultures and mindsets in her country. 

She has published with The Washington Post, So Press (France), Al Jazeera, The New Internationalist, The Sunday Guardian, Economic Times, The Wire, Marie Claire, Ariana and has been commissioned by UNICEF, Save the Children, Oxfam, and SOMO, among others.

She is a Dart Asia-Pac Fellow and was awarded the fellowship on Trauma & Journalism in Hong Kong (2015). While her origins are from Gujarat & Delhi, she now couriers her fill of Gujarati snacks and happily lives on podi-dosas in Chennai, India, where she heads Programming, Collaborations and Partnerships at the CPB Foundation.

Tarana Sawhney is the current Chairperson for The Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Task Force for Art & Culture and a member of the CII National Council since 2018. She is a governing body member of the NGO Khushii and an advisory board member of the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (FICA). Tarana is also a Member of the Tate International Council , the South Asian Acquisitions Committee of the Tate Modern Museum, London and Strategic Advisor, South Asia for Art Tactic.

During her term as Chairperson, CII has co-organised the India Pavilion along with the Ministry of Culture, Government of India at the Venice Biennale in 2019. This is a historic first for a public-private partnership of this scale internationally in this sector.

Tarana supports the FICA Public Art Project at India Art Fair annually and several projects at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. She was selected for the international Collector’s Focus Programme by David Zwirner Gallery last year from India and has co-authored an India-focused report on Art & Philanthropy with Art Tactic, U.K in 2019.

A lawyer with 3 undergraduate degrees in History, Music and Law and a Postgraduate degree in Law from Upenn, she now devotes full time to the patronage of arts. Tarana lives and works in New Delhi.

Tejas is the kind of person who spends 2 hours automating a 10 minute task. A geek and tinkerer at heart, he is responsible for all things tech at CPB - from servers and databases to live streams and websites. Building the occasional over-engineered excel sheet is also his forte.

He is an advocate for open-source software and the Right-to-Repair movement. His passion for technology is only rivalled by his love for football and immersive open-world games. 

He spends his time off experimenting with new tech, listening to podcasts, playing the piano, opening up gadgets which never get put back together or trying to learn a new skill only to drop it in a day or two.

With over 16 years of work experience within the Private and Non-Profit sector, Uday has experience with management, communications and fundraising. He is engaged in the professional principles of finance mobilization for social entrepreneurship with a commitment to work for the least.

Uday’s capacity and commitment to enlist a wide range of stakeholders in a cause-oriented enterprise has been a driving force in his recent engagements. His attitude and understanding of financial and organizational management has always been transparent, with a focus on accountability and integrity that has helped him support various education and ethical projects over the years.

His dream to work with and for children has come true, since joining the CPB Prism team. He looks forward to growing with the team’s vision of fostering a community that inspires curiosity and self-expression especially within the student communities.

Varun Gupta is a commercial photographer, serial-entrepreneur, digital ad-man and a lover of analogue photography who co-founded Chennai Photo Biennale in 2015. His alma maters include Light & Life Academy and the College of Wooster, US. In 2006 he founded Travelling Lens - a company that conducted specialised photography workshops and holidays in remote areas of India from 2007 to 2015. Photo Seva is one of his long-term portraiture projects where he travels to make portraits of local communities across India with a large-format camera and B&W film. His work has been shown by galleries in Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, New Delhi, Kochi and Pondicherry.

In 2010, Varun began work with Art Chennai (a city-wide arts event) to manage their photography exhibitions with a focus on public engagement through which they organised large exhibitions in train stations and beaches in Chennai. His love for public art saw its roots with establishing the first Chennai Photo Biennale in 2016 - an international visual arts festival that promotes and celebrates photography and discourses around it. He is the Managing Trustee of the Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation and Director of the CPB Foundation.

Yogesh is a super cool person who likes to document things and people he loves. Except for the people he works with, everyone else knows him by his alter identity, Sonu. He’s also known to be omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent.

Not only does he manage the digital archive at the CPB Foundation, he also sometimes manages to make really cool videos about literally anything around him. His daily tasks include entertaining everyone at the office.