Naveen Kishore is a photographer, filmmaker, and publisher.  He established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing program in the arts and media focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies. 

Kishore artworks are informed by his deep engagement with theatre photography, a genre he has been practicing since beginning to work in theatre productions in the early 1970s. He has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. His interest in street photography comprises the second main thread of his oeuvre.

One of Kishore’s intimate and intense seminal work is a series called “Performing the Goddess”. It puts us in proximity with an actor Chapal Bhaduri (b. 1938). Once famed for his work in jatra (a popular theater form in Bengali-speaking regions of India and Bangladesh), Bhaduri lost his prominence when women actors began to portray female characters previously played by men. Bhaduri instead found work as an itinerant performer playing the goddess Sitala, whom devotees worship for protection from disease. In “Performing the Goddess”, we witness Bhaduri’s reverent and precise nightly preparation for the role of Sitala. Kishore asks us to understand something about the complexity of Bhaduri’s interior experience. This body of work resonated widely in the 1990s and early 2000s, a moment of new critical thought about the performative nature of gender. A companion film by Kishore, “Performing the Goddess: The Chapal Bhaduri Story” (1999), explores these connections through an extended first-person encounter with the actor.