# India Foundation for the Arts

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) is an independent, non-profit organization that supports arts and culture-related projects in India through funding and implementation. Established as a public trust in 1993, it is headquartered in Bangalore and has supported over 850 projects. The organization’s founding director, Anmol Vellani, previously worked with the Ford Foundation.
In 2018, the IFA established the IFA Archive, a dedicated repository for preserving materials from its associated projects. The archive consists of both digital and physical collections. The digital archive holds materials from over 500 projects, while the physical archive in Bangalore contains resources from more than 700 projects and is open to visitors by appointment.

## Management

The Founder Director, Anmol Vellani, is a professional in arts management and organized philanthropy. He was succeeded by Arundhati Ghosh, while Menaka Rodriguez currently serves as the Executive Director.
Constituted on a national basis, the Board of Trustees holds primary responsibility for the growth and sustenance of IFA. The Trustees help determine management policies and program goals, and bring significant experience in diverse fields.

## Programs

The programs at IFA respond to demand for assistance while also encouraging new perspectives and directions in the arts, particularly promoting work in Indian languages other than English.
The Arts Research program engages scholars, researchers, and practitioners to research various histories and expressions of artistic practices in India, fostering wider perspectives, understandings, interpretations and engagements in the arts.
The Arts Practice program seeks to implement projects that enable artists to expand their present range of practices in new directions, such as questioning accepted conventions, pushing new frontiers in content, form and medium, exploring new modes of engagement with space, audience and communities, and foregrounding a spirit of experimentation. The program implements projects under the following categories:
* Explorations
* Productions
* Workshops/ Residencies
* Arts Platforms
The Arts Education program, one of the organisation's flagship programs, began in 1998-99, based on the conviction that students and youngsters would inculcate a quest for lifelong learning through the arts. The program was reviewed in 2008-09, and the recommendations led to Kali Kalisu ('learn and teach' in Kannada). IFA maintains a continuous dialogue with the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the Directorate of Public Instruction, Karnataka, and the Department of State Education, Research and Training, Karnataka to intensify its capacity building program.
The Archives and Museums program has a twofold objective: to provide arts practitioners and researchers with an opportunity to generate new, critical and creative approaches for public engagement with archives and museum collections and to energize these spaces as platforms for dialogue and discourse.

## Board of Trustees

* Ajai Kumar Singh, Civil Service, Bangalore is the Chairperson
* Alok Rai, Language and Literature, Allahabad
* Aparna Sinha, Advertising and Market Research, Kolkata
* Arti Kirloskar, Art and Industry, Pune
* Lakshmi Subramanian, History and Culture, Goa
* Nandita Palchoudhuri, Crafts, Kolkata
* Navtej S Johar, Dance, New Delhi
* S Subramaniam, Finance, Bangalore
* Saajan Poovayya, Law, Bangalore
* Sobha Nambisan, Civil Service, Bangalore
* Vivek Shanbhag, Language and Literature, Bangalore