Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant 2025: Announcing Grantees
The jury and the MMF team are delighted to announce not one but three Grantees whose projects will be supported under the Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant 2025.
The Grantees for 2025 are -
Anjali Pujari
"Listening to the forest, one insect at a time"
Sriparna Dutta
"Stitching Together What Society Erased"
Shree Tej
"A treasure hunt for memories through storytelling, printmaking, and community"
Their practice and project stay true to the grant’s vision by integrating local knowledge, lived environments, and community experiences into teaching and learning.
Anjali Pujari
Listening to the forest, one insect at a time
An interdisciplinary artist, sculptor, writer, musician, and nature educator Anjali’s practice is shaped by a deep fascination with insects, especially those of the Western Ghats. Carving fragile chalk into life-sized insect forms, she brings these often-overlooked beings back into our collective imagination. Her journey has also moved through the alternative social sector, from slow journalism to community work and grassroots education. These experiences shape her commitment to slowness, attention, and care as core principles that flow through her practice today.
Currently, Anjali works with neurodivergent children with disability, crafting sensory nature experiences shaped by forests, sound, and the delicate labor of hands. Her project Listening to the Forest in Bheemankone, Karnataka, invites intellectually disabled children to create insect-inspired artworks and storytelling circles rooted in local forest-spirit narratives, making art a bridge to ecology, belonging, and wonder.
Sriparna Dutta
Stitching Together What Society Erased
Working between New Delhi and Kolkata, Sriparna Dutta is a contemporary artist whose practice spans paper, textiles, and soft sculptural forms. Trained in painting, her work steadily moved beyond canvas into a language of care and community, where textiles became carriers of memory, resistance, and survival, she is drawn to women’s narratives, landscapes, and the overlooked gestures of everyday life, grounding her art in lived experiences rather than spectacle. Alongside her practice, Sriparna has taught for over a decade in both institutional and community spaces. Her pedagogy is rooted in listening, storytelling, and care, shaped through work with domestic workers, survivors of abuse, and marginalized children across India. Weaving her own experience as the daughter of a domestic worker into her teaching, she transforms classrooms into spaces of shared reflection and healing.
Her proposed project, Museum of Memory and Resistance, takes root in Jarkadanga, Birbhum. Through fifteen participatory workshops, Santhal children will stitch testimonies, sculpt dreams, and paint emotions, creating a living, mobile museum carried not in walls but in stories, fabric, and collective memory.
Shree Tej
A treasure hunt for memories through storytelling, printmaking, and community
Born in Hyderabad and shaped by villages, mountains, riverbanks, monasteries, melas, and classrooms under trees, Shree Tej is a design traveller whose practice has taken him across India. What remains constant is his his love for working with children, whom he regards not merely as students but as honest collaborators whose fresh, unfiltered ways of seeing compel him to reflect, adapt, and grow.
Most of his learning has come from local knowledge systems and traditional practices, learning from observation and from communities themselves. His pedagogy, rooted in humility and responsiveness, evolves through these encounters with children.
His project From Fields to Foundations invites children of Hyderguda to gather memory through walks, storytelling, and mapping with village elders. These fragments will be reimaged through printmaking, a tactile medium rarely introduced at this age, opening children to new languages of expression rooted in texture and gesture. For Shree Tej, who grew up in Hyderguda, the project is also a return — a way to re-root in the land and create space for children to rediscover their village, its stories, and their belonging.
ABOUT THE GRANT
The Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant is an annual grant that seeks to support artists-educators in India who are engaged in developing and running an art education project with school-aged children (5- 18 years of age), either within or outside the classroom. The grant encourages artist-educators whose project integrates local knowledge, and lived environments and experiences into their learning and teaching methods.
The grant amount is Rs. 1 lakh and will support a project that is completed within 12 months.
The Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant was instituted by Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation with the support of Welham Old Boys’ Society in 2024.