Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani are the founders of The Samdani Art Foundation, a private foundation based in Dhaka that aims to increase artistic engagement between Bangladesh and the rest of the world and produces the Dhaka Art Summit. Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani will discuss their vision for the Dhaka Art Summit, an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. Founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, DAS is hosted every two years at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani were recognized as the world’s Top 100 Art Collectors by ArtNet News and received the Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage award in 2017.

Chitra Ganesh is a visual artist based in New York. Ganesh’s work across media includes charcoal drawings, digital collages, films, web projects, photographs, and wall murals. Ganesh’s work has been widely exhibited, including at the PS 1/MOMA, Berkeley Art Museum, Fondazione Sandretto, MOCA Shanghai, and the Dhaka Art Summit. She has been named Robina Foundation Fellow for Arts and Human rights at Yale University Law School, the Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist, and Artist-in- Residence at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program.

Sponsors: The Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, Department of History of Art, Department of Art Practice, South Asia Art Initiative.