Sasanka Perera (Chairman)
Sasanka Perera is former Professor of Sociology at University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and South Asian University, India. His publications in English include Fear of the Visual? Photography, Anthropology and the Anxieties of Seeing (2020); Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (2016); and Violence and The Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (2015).
He has co-written Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians (2019). He has co-edited Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (2018); Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (2018); Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia: Decoding Visual Worlds (2019) and Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times (2022).
In addition, he has also translated into Sinhala Jostein Gaarder’s novel, Vita Brevis: A Letter to St Augustine (2019), Hisashi Inoue’s play, Face of Jizo (2016) and has co-translated a collection of 150 poems by the 13th century Persian poet, Jalal Ad-din Muhammed Rumi to Sinhala as තුටින් පිරී ගිය එක් මොහොතක්: ජලාල් අද්–දින් මුහම්මද් රූමිගේ තෝරා ගත් කවි (2022). He writes poetry and engages in photography in his spare time.
His third collection of poetry in the Sinhala language, සොයමින් අදිසි මොහොතක් was published in 2024.
Email: chairman@colomboinstitute.lk
Pala Pothupitiya (Treasurer)
Mr Pala Pothupitiye, obtained his BFA degree from the Visual and Performance Art University in Colombo, Sri Lanka. A sebior Sri Lankan artists with a global presence, he was raised in a family of traditional southern Sri Lankan craft-artists and ritualists, his work incorporates and reinterprets the material and philosophical content of traditional art. He confronts issues such as colonialism, nationalism, religious extremism and militarism. He extends his inquiry to the questions of caste, the distinction between art and craft, tradition and modernity, as well as generating a critique of Euro-centrism in postcolonial situations. In 2005, he was selected to participate in the third Fukuoka Triennial at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, and in 2010 he won the jury award of the Sovereign Art Asian Prize, Hong Kong. He has participated in numerous art exhibitions and art events locally and internationally, which includes Colombo Scope 2013, Sri Lanka; Colombo Art Biennale 2012; Serendipity Art Festival 2015, Goa; Singapore Biennale 2016, Singapore; Inaugural Karachi Biennale 2017, Pakistan; and Museu d’Art Contemporanide Barcelona (MACBA), 2019, Spain. Mr Pothupitiye was a founding member of Theertha International Artists Collective, a progressive artists-led initiative based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He also founded the Mullegama Art Centre, an art initiative located in Athurugiriya, a suburb of Colombo where he runs regular art workshops and an art school, supporting younger artists and schoolchildren.
Jagath Pathirage
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Kaushalya Kumarasinghe (Deputy Chairman)
Kaushalya Kumarasinghe is a Sri Lankan novelist, translator, and researcher who holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Colombo, an MA in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Durham, United Kingdom, and an MPhil and PhD in Sociology from South Asian University, New Delhi.
After completing his first degree, he joined the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo as a research translator (English to Sinhala), where he published several scholarly translations, including Nira Wickramasinghe’s University Space and Values: Three Essays (2007), Neloufer de Mel’s Marketing War, Marketing Peace: Mediating Global Capital and National Security (2007), Francesca Bremner’s Surveillance and Confinement in the Cityscape (2007), and Sunil Bastian’s How Development Undermined Peace (2007).
Later, he co-translated Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love into Sinhala with Vidura Munasinghe. In 2014, he published his first novel in Sinhala, which was later translated into Tamil, Urdu, and Hindi, followed by his second novel in 2019. Sections from the English translations of both novels are featured in the Routledge Companion to Sinhala Fiction from Post-War Sri Lanka (2022). His other notable publications include the co-authored article, ‘Snapshots from the Struggle, Sri Lanka April–May 2022’ in Anthropology Now (2022), the interview ‘Making Sense and Locating Emotions in Social Sciences: A Conversation with Margrit Pernau’ in Society and Culture in South Asia (2020), and the opinion piece, ‘Sri Lanka Uprising: A New Social Contract” in the Indian Express (2022). He is also an editor of Patitha: Samaja Sanskrutika Sameeksha published by Colombo Institute.
In addition to his research, editorial and writing work, he serves as a visiting academic in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at University of Colombo and as a researcher at the Law and Society Trust in Colombo.
Anushka S Kahanagama (General Secretary)
Anushka Kahandagamage is a PhD candidate in the Religion Program at the University of Otago, New Zealand, where she is researching new Buddhist trends in post-war Sri Lanka with a focus on negotiating power and authority. She completed her MPhil (Sociology) at South Asian University, New Delhi, with a thesis on the Buddhist Revivalist Movement Under British Rule in Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka. She also holds an MA (Sociology) from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, where her thesis explored the depiction of militarised masculinities in Sri Lankan Sinhala cinema.
At different times, she had taught at University of Colombo as an Assistant Lecturer and as a Visiting Lecturer at both the Open University of Sri Lanka and the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute. She has also contributed as a researcher to the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms in Sri Lanka, the Law and Society Trust, and the Center for Women’s Research. Her academic interests span across Buddhism, gender and visual Anthropology.
Email: secretary@colomboinstitute.lk
Aruna P Jayasena
Aruna Jayasena is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi. He is currently writing his dissertation after completing his MPhil degree in 2022. He received his MA degree in Political Science with a focus on Democracy, Conflict and Governance Studies (DECAGS) in 2015 from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and received the NOMA fellowship (2010) funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Corporation (Norad) to study politics attached to the Department of Political Science in University of Oslo, Norway for a semester. He obtained his BA (Hons) in Political Science from Hindu College, University of Delhi in 2003.
Jayasena started his career in Sri Lanka’s non-government sector with the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement (2003-2009) as a project manager and has worked across the country attached to various assignments such as Peace Building, Democracy, Good Governance and Coexistence, Post-Tsunami Rehabilitation, Child Protection and Education, and Community Health Development. He later joined the advertising industry (2011 -2014) and worked on TV commercials, video documentaries, and films. In 2014, he became the Project Officer of ‘Act4: Theatre for Change’, a non-profit organization that uses theatre and arts for social development and has engaged in various projects in the fields of youth empowerment and training, post-conflict rehabilitation, gender-based violence, child protection, promotion of fundamental and human rights through various interventions into disadvantaged and marginalized communities in Sri Lanka.
He also developed a career as a theatre stage manager in Sri Lankan theatre and has worked with several local theatre companies and groups since 2003. He received the award for the Best Stage Manager in the State Theatre Festival for “බර්නාඩා ගේ සිපිරි ගෙය” (The House of Bernarda Alba) in 2012, directed by Priyantha Sirikumara and “සාදය මාරයි සල්ලි හමාරයි” (Funny Money) in 2015, directed by Dharmapriya Dias. He has worked as a Visiting Lecturer in Stage Management and Theatre Administration at the Sri Palee Campus, University of Colombo since 2012 and the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Peradeniya since 2018.
In addition, Jayasena is a Freelance Graphic Designer and Documentary Film Maker. He has designed many book-covers for academic and non-academic publications and has produced several documentary films.
Anoli G Perera
Anoli Perera is a visual artist and writer based in Colombo, Sri Lankan with a South Asian and global presence. She studied Political Science, Economics and Sociology at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s followed by a postgraduate diploma in International Affairs from the Bandaranaike Center for International Studies, Sri Lanka. Her art education came through part time adult education art programs at City College, Santa Barbara and Artworks, Princeton, USA.
Her work engages critically on thematics that range from women’s issues, history and myth to issues of identity, colonialism and post-colonial anxieties. Her works have been exhibited in Colombo Scope, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2019; 4th Edition of Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India, 2018; Colombo Art Biennale, 2009, 2012 & 2014; ‘Artful Resistance’ Museum of Anthropology, Vienna, Austria, 2009 and Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt, Germany, 2010; Separating Myth from Reality (Art Festival), Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Japan, 2002 amongst others. Her work was included in the exhibition, ‘Greetings from India’ organized as part of 5th Edition of Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in November 2019 in China. She was invited to show at the launching exhibition of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sri Lanka, ‘One Hundred Thousand Small Tales’, 2019.
Her writings on contemporary Sri Lankan art has been published in a number of publications including Art Asia Pacific (Australia), South Asia Journal for Culture (SriLanka), Frontline (India), Asian Art Archive (Hong Kong), Society and Culture in South Asia (India) and numerous art catalogs and books on Sri Lankan art. Her book, H. A. Karunaratne published in 2019 documents the art practice of a master artist in Sri Lanka.
Her works are in many public and privateart collections including Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Museum for Art and Photography, Bengaluru and Kiren Nadar Museum, New Delhi.
Anoli Perera was a co-founder of the Theertha International Artists Collective, a progressive art initiative based in Colombo. She currently lives and works in Colombo, Sri Lanka.