Copyright © NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati
NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives in Kathmandu, Nepal, and works at the intersections of visual storytelling, research, pedagogy, and collective action. In 2007, she co-founded photo.circle. It is a thriving, independent, artist-led platform that facilitates learning, exhibition making, publishing, and a variety of other trans-disciplinary collaborative projects for Nepali visual practitioners.
In 2011, she co-founded Nepal Picture Library; a digital archiving initiative that works towards diversifying Nepali socio-cultural and political history. Kakshapati is also the co-founder and Festival Director of Photo Kathmandu, an international festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years. She served as the Festival Director for South Asia’s premier nonfiction film festival, Film Southasia, from 2013-2015. She has been a mentor for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass, was awarded the 2020 Jane Lombard Fellowship by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York, and was chair of the 2021 World Press Photo Contest Jury.
Kakshapati studied documentary photography at the SALT Institute of Documentary Studies, Maine, and International Relations and studio art at Mt. Holyoke College, Massachusetts.
Kakshapati was an attendee of the SPE / MNF Photo Education Symposium, 5-7.Jan.2020, in New Delhi.
This bio was provided by the artist.
Copyright © 2022, PhotoSouthAsia. All Rights Reserved.
(See Other Work, below)
Presentation at SPE / MNF Photo Education Event, 5-7.Jan.2020, New Delhi.
photo.circle is a platform for photography in Nepal. Through workshops, publications, exhibitions and commissioned assignment work, photo.circle strives to bring together photographers and other visual storytellers to nurture unique voices that document and engage with social change in Nepal. It is the umbrella organization that encompasses Nepal Picture Library and Photo Katmandu. Kakshapati is co-founder and director.
Nepal Picture Library (NPL) is a digital photo archive run by photo.circle that strives to create a broad and inclusive visual archive of Nepali social and cultural history. Since its inception, NPL has collected over 120,000 photographs from various private and organizational sources across Nepal. The archive serves as a safe and open repository for materials that can secure a multicultural and pluralist representation of Nepali history.
Photo Katmandu is organized by photo.circle, a platform for photography based in Kathmandu founded in 2007. It creates conversations between the city, its public, its past, and its aspirations. The festival invites photographers and other practitioners who engage with or through the visual medium to develop, showcase and participate in exhibitions, workshops and symposia, a 6-week residency, an incubator program for practitioners from across South Asia, a local arts education program for young people in the city, and various pop-up events among other core and collateral programming.
Learn more about these initiatives on their respective websites.
20 November
