User:Insearchofmeaning/sandbox

= Nico Daswani =

Biography
Nico Daswani was born in London to a French mother and British-Indian father, and grew up in Marseille, France. He began his career in the arts working at the 2000 City of London Festival before moving to Los Angeles in 2001. There he met Judy Mitoma who would become an early mentor. Working with Mitoma at the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance, he managed projects including the 2004 Asia Pacific Performance Exchange residency in Bali, and the 2005 World Festival of Sacred Music-LA, the city's largest festival. As an independent cultural producer in New York from 2005, he curated and produced a number of performances, series and festivals with organizations including the World Music Institute, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. From 2008 to 2012, he was Program Director at the Asian American Arts Alliance, where he launched the flagship monthly Town Hall, and co-conceived and directed the citywide Locating the Sacred Festival.

From 2012 to 2021 Daswani worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva where he became Head of Arts and Culture. In this role he created an international community of artists and cultural institutions with whom he developed exhibitions, installations, performances, films, talks and fellowships to advance inclusive change. Partner institutions included the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum London, and the Smithsonian Institution. Collaborating artists included Daan Roosegaarde, Mehdi Ghandyanloo, Reeps One and Es Devlin. Daswani co-conceived and produced the first international tour of the Afghan Women’s Orchestra in 2017, which became a global media phenomenon. He is an executive producer of the Emmy Award winning virtual reality films "Collisions", which he invited to be made and world-premiered at Davos 2016, and Awavena (2018), both by Lynette Wallworth. With Wallworth and with support from the Ford Foundation, he co-developed the New Narratives Lab to support the leadership development of storytellers from under-represented communities. In 2021 he co-developed with Marin Alsop the award-winning musical film See Me: A Global Concert, featuring Yo-Yo Ma and seven diverse orchestras and choirs, shot on location around the world, during the COVID pandemic.

Daswani is a board member of Cambodian Living Arts. In 2021 he published his first children's novel, Markine et la Porte Secrète, built from ten years of nightly improvised stories for his daughters. The book launched as an Amazon bestseller in several categories.

He lives in Geneva with his wife and two daughters.