Mahira is an Urdu name meaning Expert, Adept, Skilled, Acquainted and Accomplished.

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We are located in one of New Delhi’s most magnificent historic districts, Purani Dilli or Old Delhi, where the past and present seamlessly coalesce and become a spectacle.

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It was in the year 2016 when the vision of Mahira was brought to life by a group of young professionals with expertise in diverse fields related to education, art and culture. The founding members envisaged to create an organisation of a national repute, dedicated to empower and educate, diverse groups and communities through artistic and pedagogical interventions. 

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Mahira Foundation functions as a multi-faceted cultural agency that specialises in helping museums, archives and cultural institutions such as public and private collections understand their strengths, identify opportunities and work in new ways. Our services comprise Research, Documentation, Archiving, Collection Management, Conservation, Exhibitions and Project Development. We assist museums and cultural institutions to increase the public benefit of their assets - their people, their collections, their buildings, their skills, their networks and their knowledge.

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As a part of our initiative, we also organise public engagement activities such as heritage walks, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, seminars, education and outreach programmes. We believe that with the help of these pedagogical tools we can promote and facilitate artistic and socio-cultural learning experiences among individuals.

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Mahira is constantly growing and extending its reach in allied fields such as consultancy, digital marketing as well as, one of its kind, the heritage online store.

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History is made/crafted through collaboration. As historian Raphael Samuel notes in one of his seminal works 'Theatres of Memory', the creation of history is a process that includes ‘a thousand different hands’. Institutions like museums and archives are troves of our shared past, collective memories and heritage.

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As advocates/facilitators of heritage interpretation - fair representation, we acknowledge that cultural institutions like museums and archives should be built through collaborating with different stakeholders such as other cultural organisations, communities and common people. After all, we humans, inherently share a familiar/common/collective sense of the past. Therefore, at Mahira, we extend collaborations to a wide range of actors such as educators, art managers, curators, consultants, and many more.

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Mahira Foundation team members are not only experienced consultants but they have also served at museums, archives and art galleries as curators, collection managers, conservators, designers, development officers and educators. The team has extensive knowledge of art and culture, and is committed to continuing professional development fuelled by their full potential, capabilities and good work ethics.

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Our most discerning feature is that we focus the lacuna in dissemination of knowledge to common people. Our strategies for building museums and archives are bespoke, keeping in mind the diverse nature of our clients.

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Mahira Foundation emerges as a platform and the one stop solution to all services in the field. This foundation aims to disseminate art to the people of all kinds and backgrounds. Thus, it will play a major role not only in enriching the project that has been taken by the team, but also in the overall enrichment of the arts in the wider spectrum.

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