Mallika Sarabhai is a powerhouse of communication and the arts in India. Educated in business, she now leads the Darpana dance company, which works in the Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi forms. She's also a writer, publisher, actor, producer, anchorwoman ... and all her varied forms of artistic engagement are wrapped around a deep social conscience.
In the mid-1980s, she spent five years playing the lead character Draupadi in Peter Brook's Mahabharata in venues around the world. Returning to India, she entered a fertile period of choreography and creativity, starting with the dance Shakti: The Power of Women. She has founded a TV production company that produces activist programming in Gujarati, and runs Mapin, a publisher of books on art and design.