Ishita Shah

Ishita Shah is trained a designer and historian, and practices as a researcher, educator, and curator under the aegis of a personal collective: Curating for Culture. Over the last few years, her efforts have been invested in exploring frameworks for personal and community archiving through self-initiated incubation programs. Shah has also consulted as an archivist at the Pattani Archives (Gujarat), mentored at the Britto Art Trust Archive (Bangladesh), and curated an archiving and documentation project for Venkataraman Associates (Bengaluru). Most recently, Shah curated an archiving project and publication, Biome Diaries: Ecological Architecture from India (2021), for Biome Environmental Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Due to her keen interest in furthering the creative possibilities for cultural preservation in India and the Global South, Shah has curated publications, exhibitions, and dialogues with several cultural institutions and individual collaborators. Previously, Shah was UNESCO Chair coordinator at Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology (Bengaluru) and founding archivist and oral historian at CEPT Archive: Architecture, Planning and Design in India (Ahmedabad).

Shah has pursued research on the journeys of early women architectural practitioners of India as a Graham Foundation Grantee 2020; worked on a community archiving platform for Hampi-Anegundi as a Futura Tropic Fellow (2021); and curated a public exhibition, Kitchen to Kacheri (2022), using diverse personal archives as a Khoj-CISA Fellow.