Srishti Lakhera: Film maker, Basket Weaver and a farmer. Her work is inspired by her journey in the hills and the farm lands. Her need to indulge in visual story telling comes from her urge for sharing her personal stories along with the stories of others as she tries to follow an anthropological approach to storytelling.

She works in digital medium. However, her work is not confined to conventional fimmaking; she narrates stories through sound and animation. Her works have been works of non-fiction as she derives stories from the lives of the people around. Since 2013, she has been based in Delhi and runs a production house “P.S. Chhaap Productions”. She has been commissioned to make short classical animation and short films. She uses stop motion, hand cutout and claymation techniques.

Srishti Lakhera is a visual artist and a community trainer. She has worked with communities through organizations in Uttrakhandh, Tamil Naidu, Alaska and New Delhi. She has trained women, youth, people with developmental disabilities in films, animation and crafts for three years. She has developed and facilitated workshops on land conversation and sustainability. In 2012 she co-created a Story collecting traveling Cafe, “Cafe Bean Here Bean There” which mapped the demography of Northern and Western Indian states.

In the middle of her formal higher education she went on to do farming and growing her own food. This is when she connected to land and developed an understanding of land as a concept and not a mere physical object. She met farmers, activists, environmentalists, artisans and connected to the traditions of the land. Other than growing food, she worked as a basket weaver. She weaves with birch bark, sea grass, roots, reeds and bamboo. She has learnt basket weaving from indigenous people from Aleuts (native Alaskan), Adibasis of Wayanad (Kerela) and few other indigenous Indian style. She finds a certain similarity between weaving baskets and weaving a narrative. She enjoys the process where bit by bit both take a concrete shape. She sees the value in traditional knowledge and recognize how technology can preserve and archive it.

While at art school in The Evergreen State College, Washington state, she was rewarded The Foundation Activity Grant to create a Video work, which was later installed at Olympia arts walk, 2010. She is presently researching on and documenting Rural to Urban Migration and Bio-diversity of land in Nahikala, a village in Uttrakhandh under Pollination project, Flow Fund.