Siddhant Shah

Biography

Siddhant is a museum accessibility and outreach consultant, and founder of Access For ALL, a national level award winning organisation aiming to bridge the gap between art, cultural heritage, museums and disabilities. Currently, Siddhant is the Access Consultant to The Prime Ministers of India Museum, New Delhi.

The flagship programme renders museums and visual arts accessible for visually impaired and autistic groups, integrating museum objects with arts-based therapy and traditional Indian art forms.

Siddhant’s core responsibilities include access audits, providing universal design solutions and developing inclusive outreach and capacity building and training. Siddhant also works on accessible content development and digital access projects, alongside consulting on how to make museum spaces more gender neutral, safer and approachable.

During the ITP in 2021, Siddhant was interested to learn more about similar access programmes across the globe and how they are planned, created and executed at the British Museum, UK Partner museums and the ITP 2021 cohort’s museums.

Siddhant is a regular TedX speaker and UNESCO consultant alongside teaching exhibition, inclusive and universal design. A professional ambition is to develop a network of museum access experts with the goal being to make museum access a mainstream element of museology.

At the British Museum
During his time on the International Training Programme, Siddhant was based in the Asia Department and will spend his partner placement at National Museums Northern Ireland.

In 2021 participants were asked to plan and propose a temporary exhibition on the theme of journeys, drawing on their existing museum experience and the skills learnt during the programme. Siddhant worked with William Gmayi (Ghana) and Emrah Kahraman (Turkey) on his Object in focus project. Their exhibition proposal was titled Journey to the West.

Siddhant’s place on the International Training Programme was generously supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation and Charles Wallace India.

Legacy projects
In 2021 Siddhant was award an ITP Conference Grant to attend All Inclusive: Championing Accessible Museums, online.

ITP Newsletter Publications
ITP Newsletter Issue 8 (2021) Will COVID make museums more accessible?