Poonam has been doing theatre for the past 25 years and has been associated with Dastangoi for the past 10 years. Poonam, a freelance writer, and radio artist shed her inhibitions ten years ago and joined the team Dastangoi. In these 10 years, she has accomplished the art of Dastangoi and performed at many festivals and events either solo or with another Dastango. She says that the big reward of a Dastango is to be able to transport the audience to another world where the story unfolds, to recreate the magic through the power of only words. Trying to inject some life into children storytelling tradition, Poonam is an important member of the team Dastangoi for this genre. She has also written Dastan-e-Irfan-e-Buddha.

He is a veteran theatre actor who has been associated with the renowned theatre groups like Asmita Theatre and has performed hundreds of shows along with solo performances. He has been part of various Indian and International Film Projects including Red Gold, Halla Bol, Parzania and many others. His short film ‘Kavi’ was nominated for Oscars. He was also a part of National Award winning film ‘Boond’ and is a regular at television shows like Crime Patrol and CID. He also has several TVC’s to his name. Currently he’s practicing Dastangoi and has more than 100 shows to his name.

Mahmood Farooqui is an Indian writer, performer and director. He specialises in a type of storytelling known as Dastangoi. Along with his uncle, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi noted Urdu poet and literary critic, revived Dastangoi, the ancient art of Urdu story telling. He was also awarded the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Pursakar in 2010 for it. Farooqui began reinventing Dastangoi, the 16th-century Urdu oral storytelling art form, in 2005. Since then, he has performed thousands of shows across the world. Apart from bringing alive the old epic of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, he has innovated Dastangoi by using it as a medium to tell modern tales. Some of his adaptations include stories on the partition of India; a retelling of Vijaydan Detha's Rajasthani folktale, Chouboli; an allegorical take on the trial and incarceration of Dr Binayak Sen; a collage based on AK Ramanujan’s scholarly essay, ‘300 Ramayanas’; a presentation on the life and times of Saadat Hasan Manto; and an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's world-famous classics 'Alice's adventures in Wonderland', and 'Through the Looking Glass'. His latest work is Dastan-e-Karan Az Mahabharata, a retelling of the life of the great Karna based on Urdu, Persian, Hindi, and Sanskrit sources. He has over the years built a team of dastangos trained by him

Anusha Rizvi is a Delhi based writer and film director. Her first feature as writer-director was the acclaimed Peepli Live, a path breaking satire, which premiered at the Sundance Festival, 2010 in the World Competition Section. The film was nominated as India’s entry to the 83rdAcademy Awards and was awarded the Best First Film award at the 31st Durban International Film Festival, the Gollapudi Srinivas National Award for Best Debut Director 2010, the Star Screen Awards for Best Ensemble Cast, and the Apsara-Guild Award 2010 for Best Screenplay of the year. She was also selected as the India Today ‘Woman as Storyteller: Changing the Game’ Award in 2011.