Guest Faculty - Prajñādhara

Our Guest Faculty come from different professional and creative backgrounds bringing significant experience and strength to the API team

Lakshmi Satish

Lakshmi Satish is one of the founder directors of Mirra, an organisation in Chennai that works with children, teens and young adults with special needs. Lakshmi is an educator and arts-based therapy practitioner, with fifteen years of experience in teaching children. At Mirra, her work includes facilitating life skills and functional curriculum including through the arts; working with mainstream schools to create inclusive spaces where ALL children can learn together; and training parents and teachers to work together in creating inclusive spaces and nurture a sense of self in children, teenagers and young adults. Her work with children focuses on – social communication, cognition, sensory integration, attention, self-regulation, executive functions and reading and writing. Lakshmi has a Masters in English Literature and Diploma in Special Education and Arts Based Therapy. She enjoys doing drama and role-play, movement and visual arts the most among the arts.

Madhu Shukla

API Faculty

Madhu Shukla teaches the drama, play and psychosocial wellbeing modules for the API course. Madhu is a creative arts-based facilitator in Bangalore. She believes in the power of creative arts to live and lead with creativity, purpose and sense of service. She is a story practitioner and co-founder of “By the River”, a storytelling initiative started in 2014 that revels in taking the joy and power of stories to adults and communities

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Since her post-graduation in acting from The National School of Drama, New Delhi, she has also explored the applications of theatre, storytelling and psychodrama practices as facilitator for personal and leadership transformation for over 15 years. She is a also a certified Psychodrama Practitioner. The co-founder of India’s first all-women’s improv group – The Adamant Eves, she is one of the early members of the improv community in Bangalore. While Madhu facilitates workshops for a range of diverse groups, she is drawn to working with adolescent girls, helping them transition into adulthood through creative arts-based processes and practices.

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Naveen Thomas

Naveen I. Thomas currently leads Headstreams, an organisation that works on promoting human development through play. He has over 20 years of experience in the social development sector. He is a trained social worker with a specialisation in Medical & Psychiatric Social Work. Naveen has completed his Master’s and doctoral studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. As part of his doctoral studies, Naveen examined how vulnerability could be reduced in the context of disaster recovery. He has been a volunteer in several disaster responses in India.

Naveen passionately believes in the importance of play and is an experienced play facilitator. He co-founded an initiative called ‘Tackle’ which sets up free ‘play and learn’ spaces for children from low-income backgrounds. Headstreams works with children in Juvenile Homes and children in need of care and protection. Headstreams’ community work involves livelihood training for socio-economically marginalised and youth through self-help groups and entrepreneurship development support. Naveen is involved in the design and facilitation of academic courses in Play and Human Development offered by Headstreams in association with several Universities.