Founder-Director of the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India. (www.srishti.ac.in) Geetha Narayanan is primarily an educator and institution builder, the epitome of the autodidact who enters spaces that are alien, grasps the essence of them and leverages them to design pedagogies and projects that have made a mark in India and internationally. Geetha Narayanan was one of five women who launched the Ujwal Trust and set up the Aditi International School which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year in Bangalore. Aditi remains one of the most forward international schools in India. Her deep interest in education/pedagogy, art, design, technology has led her to move across the spaces of instructional design, social design, design for the underprivileged, etc. It was this interest which led her and the Ujwal Trust to launch Srishti in 1996 in Bangalore, as an alternative to the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Moving from legacy pedagogies and leaving traditional art-design educational constructs behind, Srishti is today a vibrant hub where disciplines jostle and interpenetrate each other in a dynamix mix of multi-disciplinarity, experimentalism and international projects so that Srishti students get a very different experience of holistic and constructivist education. Why I want to nominate Geetha Narayanan is because on the one hand the West is usually over-represented in spaces like this and, on the other, art and design education/educators/institutions are hardly ever represented, though they play a key role in nurturing future artist-designers. And then again, it is rarely that a "non-designer" has done so much for art and design education - at least in India!
