About
Mohika Shankar is a Kathak artist, performer and educator whose practice is rooted in nearly two decades of training in Indian classical dance.
Trained under the late Guru Munna Shukla Ji, her work draws on the rhythmic complexity, expressive depth and storytelling traditions of Kathak while exploring its relationship with contemporary movement and artistic practice.
With over eight years of professional experience, Mohika has performed and facilitated workshops across India and internationally, including the UK, Europe and Singapore. Her artistic journey has involved working across performance, education and collaborative projects, bringing Kathak into dialogue with diverse audiences, spaces and creative disciplines.
Alongside her artistic practice, Mohika is developing her interest in arts and cultural leadership and management, with a particular focus on the sustainability, accessibility and contemporary relevance of traditional art forms. She is interested in how artists and cultural organisations can create meaningful opportunities for collaboration, participation and cultural exchange.
Mohika's work is guided by the meeting of tradition and contemporary sensibilities. Whether performing, teaching or developing creative projects, she is interested in movement as a language through which stories, identities and cultural memory can be explored, shared and reimagined.
Cultural sustainability in practice: a case study of independent cultural organisations in Delhi
This thesis examines how independent cultural organisations (ICOs) sustain themselves within Delhi’s structurally fragmented performing arts ecosystem, marked by chronic underfunding, the absence of a national cultural policy, and precarious cultural labour markets.
Existing sustainability frameworks have been developed almost entirely within Western institutional contexts assuming stable governance and formalised public funding, leaving their applicability to Indian independent organisations largely unexamined.
Addressing this gap, the study adopts a relational definition of sustainability extending beyond financial viability to organisational continuity, leadership succession, programming integrity, audience relationships and adaptive capacity (Throsby 2010; Tschirhart 2006).
Using a qualitative, interpretivist multiple-case study design (Yin 2018), the research examines two contrasting Delhi-based ICOs: Kathika Cultural Centre, a heritage-led hub in Old Delhi operating through a family trust structure, and Oddbird Theatre, a contemporary black-box venue in South Delhi structured around a dual charitable-commercial entity model.
Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews, non-participant observation and documentary analysis, and analysed thematically (Braun and Clarke 2006) across economic, socio-cultural and strategic/leadership dimensions.
Findings show both organisations achieve sustainability not through financial optimisation but through mission-anchored entrepreneurial bricolage (Baker and Nelson 2005), relational community-building that reframes audiences and artists as participants rather than consumers, and adaptive, emergent strategy prioritising values-led responsiveness over formal planning (Mintzberg and Waters 1985).
Kathika sustains itself through a diversified, cross-subsidised revenue model absorbing risk through personal and social capital; Oddbird relies on a fragmented, "patched together" funding portfolio and structural hedging between its foundation and commercial arms.
Both, however, share a critical vulnerability: leadership and institutional knowledge remain concentrated in founders, with no formalised succession or governance mechanisms.
The thesis concludes that sustainability in Delhi's independent performing arts sector is best understood as mission-anchored adaptability sustained through relationships, resource bricolage and ecosystem-building, rather than financial independence or institutional permanence, contextualising established sustainability theory within the Indian setting.
Professional practice
Nguyen Hong Doan Trang
Rachel Lee
Una Lam Ut I
Loh Wei Zong
