NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati is a 2020-2022 Jane Lombard Fellow, nominated by Naeem Mohaiemen for her project Nepal Picture Library (NPL) for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Prize and is part of the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols cycle of programs.

NayanTara is a photographer and curator based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Her work seeks to embrace themes such as change, identity, gender, and history within the context of a Nepal in transition. NayanTara is the Festival Co-Director of Photo Kathmandu, Nepal’s first international photography festival, which she co-founded in 2015.

Founded in 2010, Nepal Picture Library is a digital photo archive that documents and creates engagement with a public history of the Nepali people. NPL has so far collected more than 7,000 photographs from families and organizations that want their pasts reflected in a multicultural and pluralistic narrative of Nepali history. 

NPL runs a number of public programs to create engagement for and with public audiences. The Feminist Memory Project, for example, seeks to create a visual archive of women’s movements in Nepal. This archive, collected from families and containing photographs, ephemera, and oral histories, captures how women wrote themselves into pivotal moments of Nepali history. It demonstrates how they partook in political struggle, forged paths in education, influenced public opinion through speeches and writing, and held positions of authority.

“Through archive building and storytelling, the Library reimagines conversations around traditional knowledge systems, and Indigenous ideas of futurity.”
Naeem Mohaiemen, Jane Lombard Prize Council