ABOUT THE SPEAKERS 

Pinaki De is an award-winning graphic illustrator and designer who has created nearly 600 book covers for leading national and international publishers. He is a Charles Wallace fellow with a Ph.D., two-time PublishingNext awardee, and his cover for Kalkatta won the Oxford Bookstore Prize at Jaipur Literature Festival 2017. 

Debkumar Mitra is a comics editor and founder of the Longform Comics Collective, where he helped shape the 2018 and 2022 anthologies. He teaches graphic narratives at the National Institutes of Design and continues to paint, with works held in collections worldwide. A Gordon N. Fisher Fellow, he studied mathematics at Jadavpur University. 

Argha Manna is a cancer researcher turned comics artist whose work bridges academic research and visual storytelling. He explores the history of science and social issues through both artistic and scholarly lenses. Currently Artist-in-Residence and faculty at IIT Gandhinagar, he is also a research affiliate at MIT and a visual consultant with the CoFUTURES group at the University of Oslo. 

Sankha Banerjee has over 15 years of experience in sequential art, graphic narratives, and installations. His award-winning works include a Nelson Mandela graphic novel and the Vyasa series (Penguin Random House India). His latest book, By Water (2023), was co-authored with Jason Landsel and published by Plough Books, New York. 

Santanu Debnath holds a BFA and MFA in painting and has presented solo shows including The Simple Life and After Cities Fall. He is a recipient of the Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin Scholarship (2020–21) and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2024). 

Moeinuk Sengupta is a storyteller and senior creative director at VML India, Kolkata. Beyond his professional work, he strums his guitar at house parties and actively supports the independent music band ‘Char Awkkhorer Gaan’ (Songs of the Four-Letter Band). 

Pratyasha Nath a biotechnology and biochemical engineering graduate from IIT Kharagpur (2025), moves fluidly between the life sciences and the arts. Her work embraces this in-betweenness—blending comics, experimental text, and visual storytelling to explore microbial worlds, ecological absurdities, and the entangled relationships between humans and more-than-human life. 

Gargi Bhattacharya is a JNU postgraduate and an assistant professor of English at Swami Niswambalananda Girls’ College. She is a poet, author, and translator, specializing in literary theory and postmodern fiction, and runs ECHOES Project, an NGO for education and sustainability. 

Shan Bhattacharya is a Kolkata-based artist who works with photography, text, and video. He has edited and shot music videos and independent films, co-designed photo books, contributed to art publications, and published his text-and-image narrative Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose (Tulika Books, 2020). 

Subhasis Ghosh  is a fine artist active since 2011, with works exhibited nationally and internationally, including SEAF (USA) and AMI Art Festival (KCC). His art features in private and official collections, and he has also directed the mid-length film Ruho, selected at Lift-off Global Network 2023.