Manvita Baradi is a multidisciplinary practitioner whose work spans urban planning, architecture, cultural heritage, theatre, media arts, governance reform, performance, and theatre archival research. For over three decades, she has shaped India’s discourse on urban governance, heritage management, women’s participation in development, and theatre as pedagogy and cultural memory.
 
Manvita is an accomplished theatre director, performer, researcher, and archivist, raised in a family of celebrated theatre practitioners. She has curated large theatre archives, produced documentary films, directed plays, designed sets and costumes, and taught theatre-in-education widely.
 
She brings together the rare combination of design sensibility, urban scholarship, and performative arts practice, enabling her to work simultaneously across city systems, cultural institutions, heritage landscapes, and performance ecologies.
 
As the Founder and Director of the Urban Management Centre (UMC), she has led systemic reforms across India and internationally, supporting municipalities, designing governance frameworks, strengthening local institutions, and championing sanitation worker safety. She is the Executive Trustee of the Theatre Media Centre (BUDRETI Trust) and the Founder Dean of the Faculty of Management at CEPT University, Ahmedabad.