AARTi, the Academy for Arts Research, Training and Innovation is a registered charitable institution founded in 1989 by Daksha Sheth and Devissaro. AARTi is dedicated to research, training and innovation in the performing arts in general, and dance in particular.

Activities conducted under the umbrella of AARTi includes the documentation of traditional performing arts, especially the martial, folk and ritual arts of Kerala; the conducting of short term workshops and long term training programmes in various traditional arts; and the running of a small, full-time professional dance company, the Daksha Sheth Dance Company. This company, which seeks to bridge contemporary dance and traditional Indian movement and aesthetic principles, brings together artists from different disciplines, embracing various idioms of Indian dance as well as theatre, music and the martial arts.

Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural projects are also an important part of the activities of AARTi, and over the years Daksha and Devissaro have collaborated with artists from diverse disciplines and cultures. Collaborative productions include "Sangeetam", created with the Finnish composer Eero Hameenniemi, and "Falling Angels", a co-production in 1997 with the British Dance-Theatre company The Kosh. Projects in the pipeline include "Postcards From God", a collaboration between Daksha and Devissaro and the Mumbai based poetess and visual artists Imtiaz Dharker, and "The Gilgamesh Project", an ambitious Indo-Australian collaboration to create an epic setting of the Gilgamesh myth for performance in 2002 using performers and artists from both countries.