Isha Harsha Mangalmurti

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Project 560, will capture the lives of young women footballers in Bangalore, as a participatory art project, through workshops, interviews, and storytelling, by transforming their experiences into a graphic novel, that empowers them to share their journeys while addressing gender in the urban space. Isha Harsha Mangalmurti is the Project Coordinator for this project. 

Isha Harsha Mangalmurti is an animation director, storyboard artist, character designer, and educator based in Bangalore, trained at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. where she studied Animation Film Design, with an exchange semester at Virginia Commonwealth University, School of Arts (VCUarts), Virginia, USA. She has since taught at institutions including Srishti Manipal Institute of Art and Design, Bangalore and NID, Ahmedabad. Her work has been featured in Annecy selections and platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. She won the Annecy IMC Pitching Workshop in 2024 and participated in global mentorships. She recently directed an animated short for the Goethe-Institut and co-created Lala, a TV series in development that was officially pitched at Annecy 2024. Given her experience, Isha Harsha Mangalmurti is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. 

This project titled Lala’s Football Diary involves research-driven art-making that documents the lived experiences of young women in Bangalore enrolled in PASS.FC, which is a grassroots football fellowship for girls. The project will explore the transitional space between girlhood and womanhood through the lens of sport, reflecting on identity, access, and resilience. Rooted in a deep personal connection to football, the project coordinator will explore football as an artistic tool for social design in the city of Bangalore. The choice of Bangalore as the site of engagement is deliberate, as the city has historically been a stronghold for men’s football. Bangalore has witnessed a gradual yet powerful transformation in the past decade, with women from various backgrounds claiming turf space and visibility. The first Karnataka State Women's League only began in 2019, 111 years after the state’s Football Association was formed. Today, football fields in Bangalore see mothers, students, professionals, and aspiring athletes sharing the pitch, building communities through play. Yet, these stories remain undocumented. Lala’s Football Diary will respond to this gap, focusing on how urban challenges, ranging from mobility, sanitation, to safety and mental health, impact the everyday lives of women athletes. The project will seek to surface how football creates micro-communities of care and ambition, even as space for play continues to be threatened by rapid urbanisation.

PASS.FC, short for Pass Collective, is more than just a football club. It is a platform for skilling, mentorship, and social transformation. Founded during the second wave of the pandemic, the club represents a new paradigm in women’s football, where sport becomes a tool for resisting gender norms. Its players, many from disadvantaged or conservative backgrounds, not only train to compete in national leagues but also push against social barriers such as early marriage, restricted mobility, and lack of access to public life. PASS.FC has grown from humble beginnings to secure a place in the Karnataka Women’s League and is a model for grassroots development. Through Lala’s Football Diary, Isha and her collaborators aim to honour this journey, not just by representing the on-field action, but also by capturing how football shapes off-field aspirations, confidence, and community.

The artistic process of the project will include visual storytelling workshops, group discussions, and in-depth interviews with 20 footballers between the ages of 15 and 25. These engagements will ultimately culminate in a fictionalised graphic novel, told from the perspective of Lala, a fictional 14-year-old who joins the football team and narrates the evolving dynamics of passion, struggle, and solidarity on and off the field. The project's process is designed as both co-creative and pedagogical. Over a year-long timeline, the team will conduct storytelling workshops and interviews to create zines and graphic narratives with the players. These will be shared at tournaments, schools, and community events to engage wider audiences. Simultaneously, a "storytelling toolkit" will be developed as an adaptable framework that enables participants to continue telling their stories beyond the life of the project. By equipping the players with tools of self-representation, the project will not just gather data but will build capacity and confidence among the participants. Each stage, from immersion and script development to graphic novel illustration, will draw upon Isha’s practice of blending fiction and non-fiction, echoing her previous work in animated documentaries and children's literature.

The outcome of the project will be visual storytelling workshops, a manuscript of a graphic novel and a storytelling toolkit. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the audio-visual documentation of the workshops, and digital copies of the graphic novel manuscript and the storytelling toolkit.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Project 560 programme in the manner in which it attempts to empower young women footballers in Bangalore by co-creating a graphic novel through a participatory process of storytelling, where acts of listening and imagining bring visibility to narratives that are both socially significant and emotionally resonant.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by BNP Paribas India Foundation.