Gitanjali G Govindrajan

Govindrajan grew up in a family in which music and dance were part of daily life; her grandmother sang on radio and her mother is a trained classical vocalist. She trained in Bharatanatyam and in Hindustani and Carnatic vocal music, and later in African drumming, studying djembe in Guinea.

She took a master's degree in biochemistry, in which she placed in the university rank list, and holds a postgraduate diploma in community-based rehabilitation and a diploma in neuropsychology. She is a fellow of the Complementary Medical Association in the United Kingdom and holds an honorary distinction in social work from the LADC Institute in the United States.

Govindrajan has worked for more than two decades in education and disability, and founded the Snehadhara Foundation in 2012 in Bengaluru. The foundation runs day programmes and residential training, a summer school, and outreach work in schools, and has extended its training work to other countries including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Qatar, Canada, Argentina and Brazil. It reports having worked with about 7,500 children through direct weekly interventions and more than 70,000 through indirect interventions, and having trained over 2,500 professionals in around 500 organisations in India.

She founded impART, the foundation's training and capacity-building arm, which offers certification courses and workshops for teachers, institutions and companies. She also consults with corporations on diversity and inclusion, having run workshops for organisations including Oracle, Intel, Google and Accenture.

Govindrajan received the Millennium Alliance Global Award in 2020 for her programme Kala Samvaad - Arts Practices for Inclusion, which was taken to Nepal, and the second Creative Art Therapy Award in 2020 from the Sancheti Healthcare Academy for her contribution to art therapy. She has also received the Nation Builder Award from the Rotary Literacy Mission.

She spoke at TEDx BITS Hyderabad on 'The Goodness of Life', was selected as an ACTIVATEE speaker at the 45th International Association for Experiential Education conference in Montreal in November 2017, and was a keynote speaker at the Conferencia Internacional in Buenos Aires in 2019.[2][3][4][5]