From Delhi to Belfast, my journey with FolkDeep has always been rooted in one simple but powerful desire: to keep stories alive. Through folklore, dance, cultural exchange, and community storytelling, FolkDeep was born from both personal experience and a wider question — how do we preserve the traditions, artistic practices, and lived memories that often go unseen, unheard, or underrepresented?
I’m honoured to be featured in this month’s Community Arts Partnership interview, where I share more about how this journey began, what continues to inspire the work, and the vision I hold for FolkDeep moving forward.
For me, FolkDeep did not begin as a business plan. It began as a feeling — a recognition that culture is not just something to be displayed occasionally, but something living, breathing, and deeply tied to people’s everyday lives. Growing up in Delhi and later moving to Belfast, I became increasingly aware of how traditions travel, adapt, and sometimes risk being lost in the process. At the same time, I saw the beauty of cultural exchange — the possibility of creating new spaces where people can encounter each other’s traditions with curiosity, care, and openness.
That is the heart of FolkDeep.
Through workshops, performances, storytelling sessions, and community-led projects, FolkDeep aims to connect traditional arts with new audiences in ways that feel meaningful and alive. Whether it is through folk dance, visual storytelling, artist exchanges, or hands-on cultural learning, the vision is to build bridges across generations, communities, and geographies.
Being featured in the Community Arts Partnership interview feels especially meaningful because it reflects an important part of this journey in Belfast — a city where I have continued to shape my ideas around culture, inclusion, education, and community engagement. It is here that many seeds of FolkDeep grew stronger: through conversations, collaborations, and experiences that showed me the importance of not only preserving tradition, but also creating spaces where people can actively engage with it.
The long-term dream for FolkDeep is to grow into a global hub where culture, creativity, and community thrive together. A place where traditional arts are not treated as relics of the past, but as living practices that still have relevance today. A place where artists, educators, children, communities, and cultural practitioners can come together to learn, exchange, and create. A place where storytelling becomes both an archive and an invitation.
At its core, FolkDeep is about connection — between past and present, local and global, memory and imagination. It is about honouring the traditions that shaped us while also opening them up to future generations in accessible, creative, and collaborative ways.
I’m so grateful to Community Arts Partnership for this feature and for making space for this story to be shared. It means a lot to see FolkDeep held within a wider conversation around community arts and cultural practice.