Kevin Bubriski has been photographing Nepal for forty years since arriving there as a Peace Corps village water systems volunteer in 1975 to 1978. In the 1980s he photographed throughout the country with a tripod mounted view camera, making thousands of large format film images of a Nepal. In June and July 2015 Bubriski was back in Nepal to document the devastation and recovery efforts in the Kathmandu Valley, Sindupalchok and Dolakha after the earthquakes. In November 2015 Bubriski’s photographs were on public outdoor display in Patan Durbar Square as part of the PhotoKathmandu, Nepal’s first international photography festival. Bubriski’s fine art photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Kevin was recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright and NEA fellowships. His books include Portrait of Nepal (1993) and Power Places of Kathmandu: Hindu and Buddhist Holy Sites in the Sacred Valley of Nepal (1995). Bubriski’s collection of Nepal’s Moaist combatant portraits. Maobadi was published and printed in Kathmandu with Himal Books in 2011. In conjunction with receiving the Peabody Museum Robert Gardner Visiting Fellowship in 2010, Bubriski’s large retrospective monograph Nepal 1975-2011 was published by Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM and the Peabody Museum Press of Harvard University in 2014.

Nitin Sawhney is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School. His research, teaching and creative practice engages the critical role of technology, civic media, and artistic interventions in contested spaces. He examines social movements and crisis contexts, though forms of creative urban tactics, participatory research, performance and documentary film. Nitin previously taught at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) and conducted research at the MIT Media Lab on networked collaboration for sustainable product design, ubiquitous computing and responsive media in urban spaces. At The New School he has conducted research on participatory data-driven activism through OccupyData Hackathons in New York City and facilitating DIY urbanism for civic action in neighborhoods of Moscow. Nitin established the Engage Media Lab at The New School for students to design and conduct participatory media-based learning and assessment with youth in New York City, and has previously conducted research with Palestinian youth in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. He co-curated the Guatemala Después project, examining contemporary artistic practices through collaborative exhibitions held in New York City and Guatemala from April-November 2015. He is currently completing a new documentary film, Zona Intervenida, focusing on historic memory through site-specific performance interventions in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

Rabi Thapa is a writer and editor based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He is the author of the short story collection Nothing to Declare (2011, Penguin India) and the Editor of the literary magazine La.Lit (www.lalitmag.com). Rabi’s writing has appeared in Outside Online, Profil, Indian Quarterly, Himal Southasian, The Cricket Monthly, Live Mint, Mumbai Mirror, The Sunday Guardian, We Are Here and The National. His short biography of Thamel, Kathmandu’s tourist quarter, is due to be published in October 2016, and he is now working on a book on Nepal’s environment.

Kesang Tseten is a Nepali of Tibetan origin, writer-turned filmmaker, is passionate about narrative art, slowly finding his voice with intelligent and culturally sensitive films from the margins. His films have been nominated and won awards at the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival and FSA. WE CORNER PEOPLE won the Slovenia TV Award and the Special Jury Award at the ’07 Slovenia International Mountain Film Festival and was selected for the New Asian Currents of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival ’07. On the Road with the Red God: MACHHENDRANATH won the Grand Prize at the Kendal Mountain Film Festival (’06), Mention at the Bilan du Ethnographique, and was voted Best Documentary of the Decade by Nepal Motion Pictures Association (’05). WE HOMES CHAPS featured at Film South Asia and the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival and is used in classrooms and workshops in India and the US.