REZWANA

Rezwana Choudhury Bannya is a Bangladeshi singer. She is an exponent of Rabindra Sangeet, the songs written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore. She has won many awards including Bangladesh's highest civilian award the Independence Day Award (2016). Rezwana was born in Rangpur, Bangladesh to her parents Mazharuddin Khan and Ismat Ara Khan. Her early singing lessons started with her uncle Abdul Ali that continued later under the tutelage of Sanjida Khatun and Atiqul Islam at Chhayanaut and Bulbul Academy of Fine Arts (BAFA) in Dhaka. As she continued taking lessons in music and singing, she also joined the Economics Program at the university after completion of her schooling. However, soon her inner- self-came to the realization that music was her destiny. She received a scholarship from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) to study in Sangit Bhavana at Santiniketan, the university that was founded by Tagore himself. She took lessons from artists including Kanika Bandyopadhyay, Nilima Sen, Sailajaranjan Majumdar, Santidev Ghosh, Gora Sarbadhikary, Manju Bandyopadhyay and Asesh Bandyopadhyay. She trained under Kanika Banerjie (Mohor Di). Bannya is currently Professor and founding chair of the Department of Dance at the University of Dhaka; previously, she had been an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the same university. She also founded Shurer Dhara in 1992, a school for learning music in Dhaka. In 2010, in order to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, she brought out a complete audio version of Gitobitan, called Sruti Gitobitan.