About Katharina

Photo credit: Rohit Chawla
Katharina Kakar, born in 1967 in Germany, studied Comparative Religion, Anthropology and Indian Art History at the Free University, Berlin, where she taught at the Institute of Comparative Religion and took her Ph.D. in 2001.
She is the author of several books and was a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religion in Harvard, USA (2001/2002) and at Morphomata, Center for Advanced Studies in Cologne, University of Cologne (2011-2014).
In 2003, she moved with her husband, the writer Sudhir Kakar, to a village in Goa/India where she lives and works as a writer and artist.
2008 onwards she founded and volunteered for the non-profit organization Tara Trust, which uses creativity and art as a tool for growth and education. Katharina connects individuals from around the world with socially engaged people and projects in India, to mutually learn, experience, grow and engage with themes such as environmental issues, wildlife, water and garbage.
In 2012, she began to work as a visual artist. Her body of work emerges from her academic base in anthropology. Many of her artworks include copper and wax as well as materials of her immediate environment. She sees herself as a cultural “bridge-builder” within constantly shifting realities.
She perceives her art and writing as a confluence of her work and life choices of the past 20 years, a cross-pollination of her creative and academic selves.
Katharina divides her time between visual arts and writing. Currently, she is in the process of finishing her first novel.