Professor Chakraborty has been closely associated with different academic Institutionsand is a Visiting Fellow of a number of Universities. He has guided and supervisedmore than 40 Ph.D scholars on different aspects of Folklore and has authored morethan 60 books on the subject of folklore. He is a regular contributor to differentjournals and periodicals. Professor Chakraborty is a Griffith prizeman and a SirAsutosh Mookerjee Gold Medalist from Calcutta University.

He is at present Vice Chairman of Gurusaday Museum and president of Loukik.

Dr Chatterji has spent the last three decades researching folk culture in Puruliaand Medinipur, West Bengal. She works on narrative traditions and the way in whichthey are inflected by the media in which they are embodied, i.e. in dance or asoral or printed stories or as paintings. She is also interested in the discourseof folklore and the ways in which the representations that it produces shape theobjects of research. She is currently working on folk art and new media in Medinipurand Bhopal and is comparing the Chitrakar style of picture storytelling with theGond style that also draws from a living bardic tradition. She has worked on theways in which novelty enters into the process of folklore production through newsocial processes such as the art market and through new forms of storytelling suchas proscenium theatre and the graphic novel. As part of her research on folk art,she has also curated the following exhibitions based on her collection of scrollpaintings from Medinipur:

Global Events and Local Narratives: Contemporary Scroll Paintings from Bengalfrom the collection of Roma Chatterji was held at the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature– The Folk Art Museum, New Delhi, October 25th to 31st 2008

9/11 and Folk Art: The Making of a Series was held at St. Stephen’s College,Delhi University, November 5th 2009

Myths in Patua Art was part of the Exhibition on Sacred Art held at MatiGhar, Indira Gandhi National Centre of the Arts, New Delhi in March 20th to 25th2010

Dr. Ranjan Sengupta, a PhD in High energy Physics, was the Senior Research Scientist and Head, Scientific Research Department, ITC Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata for 27 years. Thereafter he has been associated with the Neuro-Cognitive Physics Laboratory of Sir C V Raman Centre of Physics and Music, Jadavpur University, as a researcher. He is also acting as a PhD supervisor of various students in the same laboratory. He has published more than 150 papers in the area of High Energy Physics,Music Signal Processing, Speaker Recognition, Music Information Retrieval, Music Perception and Cognition and Music Acoustics. He is a recipient of Sir C V Raman Award from Acoustical Society of India. He is the joint editor of Ninaad (a scientific journal on Music) published by ITC Sangeet Research Academy.

Jayasri Banerjee is a professional sitar player as well as a musicologist, with interest in both classical and popular traditions of music. Her early research was on teaching methodologies of classical music in different institutional and non-institutional contexts. She has also worked on Adivasi music and musical instruments and undertaken extensive fieldwork, documentation and advocacy of endangered musical genres.

Aditi Deo holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA,and has been a student of Khayal vocals for several years. Her dissertation focuseson non-hereditary and non traditional practices in Khayal music, looking particularlyat pedagogy in contemporary India. She has a keen interest in issues of music pedagogy,cultural institutions, the involvement of the private sector in public culture,media representations of music and musical cultures, among others. As part of herdissertation fieldwork, she conducted sustained ethnographic research at ITC SRAin 2007, examining its institutional adaptation of the traditional guru-shishyaparampara. During this period, she primarily observed talim and riyaz sessions,and conducted interviews with gurus, scholars, and staff at SRA, and concerned officialsin ITC.

She conducted field research in India as a postdoctoral associate on the project:"Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies," withProf. Georgina Born at the University of Oxford, UK. Her interest is in the mannersin which digital and media technologies are being used by (and as a corollary, transforming)folk musicians and their practices, as well as archival approaches to folk music.She is currently a Visiting Fellow at IISER (Indian Institute of Science Educationand Research), Pune, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr Barun De (30 October 1932 – 16 July 2013) ,  historian & former Chairman, West Bengal Heritage Commission was also on our advisory panel. The eloquent Barun De specialized in India’s social and economic history in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bengal Renaissance and British constitutional history. De, who was born in October 30, 1932, into an illustrious Brahmo family, studied at Presidency College. After his graduation, he went to St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, to complete a second BA in history,and later obtained an MA from the University of Oxford. In the late 1950s, De was lecturer at Calcutta University. He completed his D.Phil in Indian history at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1961. De held several prestigious academic positions since,and was a member of many organisations. He was a professor in history at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta; the director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, which he had set up; honorary state editor for the West Bengal District Gazetteers and director of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta, which too he had set up. He was also member of the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi and chairman of the West Bengal Heritage Commission.

Abhijit Gupta (1954-2014) was a designer-entrepreneur till 1991, after which he decided to research the indigenous architecture of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam on his own. This led him to study, research, collect and promote traditional art forms of West Bengal. He was also a managing committee member of Karu Angan – a museum of Crafts of West Bengal, which he helped design.

He established himself as a full time visual artist with his solo show "Oblique Memoirs and Other Mind games" in 2001 at CIMA Gallery, Kolkata and followed it up with various international and national shows. He was also a practicing video artist and his work was showcased in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Washington and all over India.

He was awarded the Senior Fellowship of the Department of Culture, Government of India in 1997 and received the UNESCO-Aschberg Fellowship in 2005 and was an artist-in-residence in Brazil.

He was the Founder President of Khoj Kolkata Artists’ Initiative and was responsible for authoring many projects including “Designs on a Delta” which was showcased in Aedes Berlin as part of the Asia - Pacific week in 2011.

He was also the inspiration behind Daricha Foundation and his effervescence, joie de vivre and support are sorely missed.