Performing Heritage (ePub)

Navina Jafa is a cultural activist, an academician, and a renowned performing artist. Having pioneered academic cultural tourism, her work has reached out to academicians, high-level political and economic delegates, students, corporate executives, and children. She has designed and executed academic tours all around India, including Ladakh, Spiti, Sikkim, Central India, South India, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and West Bengal.

She was a Fulbright Scholar on Cultural Management and Representation at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington DC, USA. She also taught a program on Performance, Culture, and Development at Brandeis University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. She has contributed to development programs for artisans at the Foundation for Arts, a nonprofit organization based in Delhi.

She is currently a lead consultant with the Asian Heritage Foundation and the Director of Indian Cultural Heritage Research, a pool of researchers looking at creating dossiers on the cultural heritage of South Asia. She has recently been appointed as a Heritage Consultant by the Shahjahanabad Redevelopment Corporation, Government of Delhi, where her role is to strategize a heritage movement program among citizens of Delhi, to develop heritage activities with citizens groups, working with over 500 schools on heritage and education, and to assist in creating public awareness on keeping heritage landscapes clean.

Dr Jafa is also responsible for the project on cultural mapping of intangible heritage for the organization. She has recently been invited by Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), Government of India, to develop an exhaustive program and website on Heritage Education. Her work on heritage presentation has been recently reviewed in the Financial Times as “Gatekeeper of the Spectacular!”Along with her work on heritage she continues to perform Kathak as a