The early seventies. Calcutta was a city in ferment. Political idealism, experimentation in theatre and cinema, cultural statements. The cutting edge of the avant-garde. Seagull Empire was born with a rock concert, the very first all-original music rock concert in the country, by the pioneering rock band The Great Bear. Seagull soon grew into an impresario and production unit which conceived and presented out-of-the-ordinary shows and theatre events. Parallel cinema was an equally exciting area of focus, and in 1982, out of the felt need for documentation and preservation of all this activity, grew Seagull Books, a publishing programme dedicated to serious documentation and critique of theatre, cinema, the arts, culture.

In 1987 the Seagull Foundation for the Arts was formed, out of the realization that, by choice and instinct, Seagull's priority was non-profit support activity for the arts and culture. As a registered non-profit charitable trust, it could legitimately dedicate itself to quality projects in this area and apply for funding in order to do so. Documenting and disseminating, publishing books and a theatre journal, arranging forums, providing support systems, networking, exhibiting, designing. Though seemingly diverse, all these activities fall quite naturally within the supporting and disseminating role Seagull chooses to play.

Abani Lahiri, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Amaresh Datta, Anjum Katyal, Anuradha Kapur, Arun Mukherjee, Ashit Paul, Banaphool, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, C. S. Lakshmi (Ambai), Chandrasekhar Kambar, Chitrita Banerji, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, David Hays, Dina Mehta, Eisenstein, G.P. Deshpande, Gaston Roberge,, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Habib Tanvir, Jabbar Patel, Jogen Chowdhury, John Hood, K. G. Subramanyan, K. N. Panikkar, Ketan Mehta, Mahasweta Devi, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Makarand Sathe, Manjula Padmanabhan, Manoj Mitra, Marta Jakimowicz-Shah, Meera Mukherjee, Mrinal Pande, Mrinal Sen, Naveen Kishore, Nemai Ghosh, Nikolai Bukharin, Nirode Mazumdar, P. Sudhir, Poile Sengupta, Premendra Mitra, Rana Bose, Ratan Thiyam, Richard Schechner, Rustom Bharucha, Samik Banerjee, Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, Satish Alekar, Satyajit Ray, Shanta Gokhale, Shyam Benegal, Siddhartha Basu, Somnath Hore, Sudeshna Banerjee, Sumanta Banerjee, Shampa Banerjee, Tarkovsky, Tejaswini Niranjana, Tooppil Bhaasi, Vijay Tendulkar, Vilas Sarang, Vinay Lal, Vivek Dhareshwar.