Deepa Mehta is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker whose work is celebrated on an international scale. Her emotionally resonating, award-winning films have played every major film festival, and been sold and distributed around the globe. Her films include the Elemental Trilogy: Earth, Fire, Water, the final film of which received an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, Bollywood/Hollywood, Heaven on Earth and the epic adaptation of Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie’s three-time Booker Prize winning novel. Her work challenges traditions and stereotypes and is always daring, fearless and provocative. It’s this spirit that saturated her latest work, Anatomy of Violence. Amongst her many honours, she has just received her star on Canada’s Walk of Fame and the Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cinema at the Reykjavík International Film Festival.

Rohan Murty is a technology entrepreneur. At Harvard University, he founded the Murty Classical Library of India, whose mission is to present the greatest literary works of India from the past two millennia to the largest readership in the world. He has a PhD in computer science from Harvard and an undergraduate degree from Cornell. His research work on white spaces networking was seminal in opening up a new area of inquiry and has won awards and fellowships from Microsoft Research, Siebel foundation, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 2012 he was selected as a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard.

Priyamvada Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale. She is recognized for her seminal contributions to the study of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes. She uses gravitational lensing observations, the deflection of light rays by matter in the universe, to map the detailed distribution of dark matter. Another abiding interest has been the study of the growth history of black holes over cosmic time and, in particular, the formation of the first seed black holes. She has proposed and worked on models for the formation of massive black hole seeds, direct collapse black holes and their observational signatures.

Recipient of many awards and honors for her work including the Guggenheim, Caroline Herschel and Radcliffe fellowships, she also holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship at the Dark Cosmology Center at the University of Copenhagen, and an honorary professorship for life at the University of Delhi.

Aside from research, she is also deeply invested in the public dissemination of science. She is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and her first book, Mapping the Heavens: Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos, was published in 2016.

Arshia Sattar has a Ph.D. from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She has been a Fulbright Scholar (2010) and a Rockefeller Centre Fellow (2009). Arshia has translated Sanskrit Tales from the Kathasaritsagara and The Ramayana of Valmiki, both of which are published as Penguin Classics. Her most recent publications include Uttara: The Book of Answers (Penguin India, 2016) and The Ramayana for Children (Juggernaut, 2016). She continues to work with the Valmiki Ramayana and teaches courses on classical Indian literatures in India and abroad. She also writes on books and Hindu myths for various magazines and journals and over the last decade, has been a jury member for several literary awards.

Vivek Shanbhag is one of India’s leading novelists. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays. Several of his short stories have been adapted into plays and one has been made into a short film. Shanbhag was editor of the literary journal Desha Kaala from 2005 to 2012, and founding editor of the literary supplement of Prajavani, a leading Kannada newspaper. His short stories have been translated into English and other Indian languages. His critically-acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar was published in India, the US and UK in English translation; it is now translated into 16 other languages. He is the co-translator of U R Ananthamurthy’s book Hindutva or Hind Swaraj into English. Shanbhag was a Fall 2016 Honorary Fellow at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. He is an engineer by training, and lives in Bangalore.