Chobi Mela International Photography Festival

Chobi Mela is a biennial international festival of photography held in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is the largest festival of photography held in Asia. Chobi Mela VIII will take place at the end of January 2015. The key organisers are Drik Picture Library Ltd. and Pathshala (The South Asian Institute of Photography).

The outreach programme consisted of mobile exhibitions which went to schools, playgrounds, market places. The exhibitions were accompanied by community liaison staff who explained the context of the show to viewers. Visits to the exhibition by school children and guided tours by curators were also arranged. An exhibition on the plight of Bangladeshi Jute workers was shown on the walls of the courtyard of "Kalpana Boarding" a low cost motel in Old Dhaka. These programmes have been extremely successful and the model has been replicated in far flung countries, such as Bolivia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.

The opening of Chobi Mela V was on 30 January 2009 at the Bangladesh National Museum where the opening was through a show on Nelson Mandela and a remarkable video conference between Mahasweta Devi and Noam Chomsky talking about the festival theme "Freedom".