The Art1st Artist-Educator Grant is awarded to the artist-educator whose practice engages with Art Pedagogy, especially in the space of (in)formal school education.
The Artfirst Artist-Educator Grant, now in its fourth year, supports artist-educators in collaborating closely with school teachers and students to bring arts-based, creative, and critical practices into everyday classroom learning. The grant fosters meaningful engagement within school spaces, enabling artist-educators and teachers to co-develop innovative, art-integrated teaching methodologies. It also focuses on empowering children and young people from diverse and marginalized backgrounds by nurturing context-sensitive, inclusive, and imaginative approaches to learning that expand their ways of seeing and engaging with the world.
Maurya Goldy aka (just) Goldy, doesn’t recall looking forward to school; instead, she would bunk classes and wander through Chhapra, Bihar, spending time with phone repairers, potters, and shoemakers, observing, building friendships, and slowly learning their skills. Now, she finds immense joy in entering classrooms as a facilitator, has been a key contributor to Khamir’s Sugri Shala Crafts Curriculum, and continues to conduct arts-based workshops for young people across the country.
Through this Artfirst grant, Goldy is excited to work with learners, students of MBSNS, creating dialogue and creativity, expression, and wonder.
The Creative Educator Practitioner Grant was awarded to Twinkle for the year 2025-26.
Twinkle has always been drawn to questions about how learning happens, how beliefs take shape, and how we can step back, observe, and choose differently. Theater and music have been her guiding forces in navigating these questions, revealing unseen layers within herself and the world around her. It feels like the path she was meant to walk and enjoy.
The Creative Educator Practitioner Grant supports one grantee in building a sustainable facilitator-to-facilitator model for developing creative pedagogy. This year, Twinkle received the grant and went on to work closely with a diverse group of participants across disciplines, languages, and practices for 1 year.
Designed and anchored by Art1st Foundation and Conflictorium, the grant programme additionally offered a hybrid (offline + online) certificate course (free) to 10 participants from various walks of life wanting to learn and explore poetic, political, and playful approaches to art-based pedagogy, through hands-on methods, tools, and conceptual inquiry. All the 10 participants were mentored closely by Twinkle as well as Art1st and Conflictorium team.
The Art1st Educator Grant was awarded to Dhrubajit for the year 2024-25.
Dhrubajit Sarma is a visual artist and educator based in Assam, India. In his practice, he traces the landscape by bringing together its various situations, sounds, human conditions, orality and non-human perspective to create books, prints, and experimental animated videos.
Art1st grantee Dhrubajit Sarma collaborated with Muskaan, Jeevan Shiksha Pahal in Bhopal — to explore the interplay of food, memory, and learning. This collaboration grew from Dhrubajit's project Season as School, which reimagines art-making through the lens of seasonal change.
A visual artist and educator from Assam, Dhrubajit brings to his practice a deep sensitivity to landscape, sound, orality, and human and non-human experiences — all of which profoundly shaped this year-long engagement. Working closely with educators and students at Jeevan Shiksha Pahal, he developed artistic pedagogies rooted in seasonal observation, placing the season at the centre of learning through workshops, curriculum development, and documentation. At its heart, the project sought to nurture creativity, confidence, and pride in identity among children from marginalized communities — with guidance and support from Art1st mentor Achal Dodia.
The Art1st Educator Grant was awarded to Kripa for the year 2023-24.
Kripa is an illustrator and writer based in Mumbai. The characters in her books are real people derived from her association with the grassroots. Her art is rooted in her engagement with her city Mumbai, it’s children, people and their problems. She is committed to making books accessible to children from all walks of life by helping communities set up libraries. Kripa took up teaching Art and Design after completing Fine Art from Sir JJ school of Art. She has been an Art educator for over 19 years, and worked with institutions like Srishti school of Art design and technology and is currently working with Ecole Intuit Lab.
Kripa engaged with teachers from Har Mandir Primary School in Madikeri, Kodagu, Karnataka which is a free part-residential school rooted in the local traditions and ecosystem for underprivileged children. The program comprised two phases. In the first, teachers explored themes like caste discrimination and gender biases and also had interactive sessions integrating art with subjects like Maths and Science. It included a six-day onsite visit and monthly online sessions. The second phase, focusing on water, involved collaborative design with teachers and a six-day physical visit, supplemented by online sessions. Activities included exploring the River Kaveri, gathering stories, observing biodiversity, and interviewing experts.
Through the program, we have managed to achieve some meaningful collaborations with environmental organisations in Coorg such as Coorg Wildlife Society and create some Social impact by reaching out to media people, activists and artists thus inviting them to the school to meet the children as well as enable children to create posters for various causes. Her method has been a disruptive pedagogical intervention by enabling counterintuitive approaches and unlearning strategies.
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