Contributing pro­ducer

Thupten Kelsang Dakpa is a free­lance writer liv­ing in Delhi. He became inter­ested in the lack of con­nec­tiv­ity between cre­ative Tibetans while work­ing on his graphic novel Of Shamans & Shadows, and founded the Tibetan Art Collective in April 2011. The Tibetan Art Collective is an emerg­ing global net­work of young visual artists, pho­tog­ra­phers, poets, writ­ers and cinematographers/​filmmakers of Tibetan ori­gin. The Collective pro­vides a plat­form for ama­teur and pro­fes­sional artists to inter­act, col­lab­o­rate and share their aes­thetic vision. One of the goals is to encour­age the depic­tion of Tibetan mys­ti­cism in its right­ful con­text in pop­u­lar media and dis­cour­age per­pet­u­ated stereo­types of Tibetan iden­tity. The Collective has launched a num­ber of online projects such as 90% of my mind is with you and a Tibetan web-​​comic series titled How the East was Lost.

His maiden radio series, The Exile Files, explores the dynam­ics of inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ship between the sexes in the Tibetan dias­pora. In the series, Thupten delves into the con­ven­tional Tibetan par­a­digms of courtship and notions of vir­gin­ity, sex­u­al­ity, promis­cu­ity, con­sen­sual sex vs. molesta­tion and rape.