Serendipity Arts Festival

In the three years since its inception, the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa has become one of the largest annual interdisciplinary cultural extravaganzas in South Asia. Events and experiences are chosen by a panel of 14 curators and presented over the course of eight days in December. All across Panaji, you can visit several places that host these celebrations of the gastronomic, performing, and artistic arts. The locations encompass anything from museums and riverboats to historic homes and public parks.

Artists including ceramicist Kristine Michael, chef Rahul Akerkar, bharatanatyam dancer Leela Samson, Hindustani classical musicians Aneesh Pradhan and Shubha Mudgal, photographer Ravi Agarwal, actress Arundhati Nag, and cultural historian Jyotindra Jain have all served as curators over the years. The Serendipity Arts Festival features lectures, workshops, and other activities with the overarching goal of making art more widely available. In 2020, after four iterations in real life, the festival went virtual.

In terms of music, the festival was curated by percussionist Bickram Ghosh and guitarist Ehsaan Noorani; in terms of craft, the festival was curated by Anjana Somany, director of Somany Ceramics, and Pramod Kumar K. G., managing director of museum consulting company Eka; in terms of culinary arts, Prahlad Sukhtankar, founder of The Black Sheep Bistro; in terms of theater, director Quasar Thakore-Padamsee for theatre; artists Sudarshan Shetty and writer-researcher Veerangana Solanki for visual arts’ and Indian classical dancers Mayuri Upadhya and Geeta Chandran for dance.