Madhusree Dutta

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, art producer and curator based in Mumbai and Berlin. Her films broadly engage with urbanology, hybridity, moving people and archiving practices. Madhusree has received three National Awards, Filmfare Award, Lifetime Achievement Award at IDSFFK (Kerala) and several international awards for her films. She relinquished her national awards in 2015 in protest against state sponsored cultural intolerance. Her latest film Flying Tigers, on war, memory and infrastructure, premiered at Berlinale 2026.

She was the executive director of Majlis Culture Centre, a centre for cross-disciplinary and collaborative art practices in Mumbai, 1998-2016 and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, Germany, 2018-2021.

Madhusree’s curatorial works include Expression, the first women’s arts festival in the country in 1990. The festival became the base for Majlis Culture Centre. Some of her other curatorial works are Culture@World Social Forum in 2004 in Mumbai, 2005 in Porte Alegre, Brazil, and 2007 in Nairobi;  Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices – a disciplinary interface between cinema, visual arts, architecture and urban planning, 2008-2014.  While with the Academy in Cologne she curated Copy It: only for those who have sinned - stolen or copied books, artworks and ideas…, 2019; Memory Stations, a community-based memory project, 2019; and Hands: an art campaign, in response to the social isolation during COVID pandemic, 2021.

Her publications include Sites and Practices: an Exercise in Cultural Pedagogy, (co-editor) 2006;  dates.sites: Bombay / Mumbai, a graphic timeline of the cinema city Bombay / Mumbai, 2012; Project Cinema City, an anthology on the city and its cinema (co-edited), 2013; fake hybrid sites palimpsest: Essays on Leakages (co-edited), 2022 and How to Make Female Action Heroes, a monograph of hidden gendered history of cinema, 2023.