Medhavi Gandhi

Medhavi Gandhi is a cultural practitioner and creator of The Heritage Lab, a platform that engages audiences with archival material in ways that foreground interpretation, context, and close observation. Her work spans writing, research, participatory campaigns, and collaborations with museums, libraries, technology platforms, and cultural organisations across India, Europe, the UK, and the US. She advocates for open and public access to cultural heritage.

Previously, Medhavi founded and led Happy Hands Foundation, an artisan-support non-profit where she developed India’s first design residency for craftspeople, entrepreneurship programmes for women-artisans, an arts-education programme with Teach For India, and cultural collaborations between British, Australian, and Indian artists.

Medhavi has served on the Advisory Board of Europeana Foundation, led the digital working group as part of the Board of the Commonwealth Association of Museums and currently serves on the Wikimedia Grants Committee for the SAARC Region.

She is an alumna of the US State Department’s Leadership program (2011), British Council’s Young Creative Entrepreneur programme (runner-up, 2011), and has been a finalist at the Rolex Awards for Enterprise (2014). Medhavi has been recognised as a Social Business Torchbearer by Re:Think India (2018), and was named one of the Top 50 Museum Influencers by Blooloop in 2020.

Outside of work, you’d find her occasionally photographing street scenes, mostly museum-hopping, always on the hunt for stories, adventures, and handmade things. She also edits Wikipedia and Wikidata entries about women in the arts and South Asian cultural movements.