Kim Yeshi

Kimberly Sciaky Yeshi (Tibetan name Pedron, born 1966) is a French-American anthropologist. In 1995, as a cofounder she opened the Norbulingka Institute near Dharamsala in northern India where she and her husband Kalsang Yeshi seek to preserve Tibetan traditions and culture.

The daughter of a French father from Thessaloniki, Greece, and an American mother, Yeshi was born in the United States and maintained her American citizenship. She spent her first 17 years in Saint-Cloud just west of Paris where she completed her school education. From 1977, she attended Vassar College in New York State like her three sisters before her, majoring in anthropology while taking Tibetan language lessons in New York City as a means of pursuing her ambition of living in Asia and doing "something other people didn't usually do". She continued her Tibetan Buddhism studies at the University of Virginia where she earned a Ph.D. in 1979. In 1978 in England, she married Kalsang Yeshi who had taught her Tibetan in New York. He was a Tibetan aristocrat who, after spending 18 years in Chinese prisons, had become a minister in the Dalai Lama's government in exile.

After their marriage in 1979, she and her husband settled in Dharamsala in northern India where they both worked for the Tibetan cause. They started a family and prepared plans for creating the Norbulingka Institute, a cultural center aimed at preserving traditional Tibetan arts and techniques of painting, metal work and textile manufacture.

The Norbulingka Cultural Centre in particular includes a Japonese garden, a large Tibetan temple, thangka workshops, and above all Kim Yenshi's museum of Tibetan dolls which have been produced by the monks from the temple and represent various regions and occupations in Tibet. When Kim Yeshi and her family arrived in Dharamsala in 1984, they invited four monks to live with them. She was inspired to encourage them to make Tibetan dolls in fine local costumes clothed in textiles she discovered in the Delhi markets. They were first exhibited in the library of Westminster Abbey following the visit of the Dalai Lama with the support of the UK Tibet Society and soon afterwards in Paris. They are now displayed not only in the Norburlingka Institute but in museums around the world.

...
Wikipedia