CO-FOUNDER

Jorge Mañes Rubio

Jorge Mañes Rubio is an artist based in Amsterdam, a TED Senior Fellow and a recipient of the S&R Foundation Washington Award. His practice revolves around providing more diverse, personal narratives for the future. His works can be perceived as active matter; something that can be handled, experienced, and ultimately activated. He has exhibited at leading museums worldwide including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Victoria & Albert Museum London and the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. 

CO-FOUNDER

Amanda Pinatih

Amanda Pinatih is Design Curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam where she provides the vast design collection with new perspectives and makes exhibitions that responds to today’s social, decolonial and environmental issues. Simultaneously as a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam, Pinatih is researching what Indonesian objects, that came to the Netherlands during colonial times, afford in contestations of belonging for young people who self-identify as Indonesian-Dutch. 

CREATIVE COORDINATOR

Kruti Saraiya

Kruti Saraiya is a graphic designer/ typographer based in Mumbai. The focus of her practice has been to allow for a contemporary Indian design narrative to emerge to fill the gap between mtv kitsch and traditional Indian crafts. As a typographer, she sees her role in infusing context into letters and bringing the written word alive. Her strengths lie in working with scripts of Indian languages to create an equal space for them alongside English in urban India. Her commercial and experimental work celebrates the Indian aesthetic in a fusion of east and west. 'The key', she says, 'is to change our mindset from an either-or to an AND.’ Besides this her portfolio includes branding, packaging, editorial and web design across verticals. She has been a speaker at the Indian Design Forum – IDF 2013. She currently has an independent practice and teaches in the Visual Communication Department at the Indian School of Design and Innovation (ISDI) and Ecole Intuit. 

ADVISORS

Matias Echanove/Rahul Srivastava (URBZ)

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava run urbz offices in Goa, Geneva and Mumbai. They joined forces in 2006 and have organized workshops engaging local residents and urban practitioners in Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Geneva, Istanbul, Brooklyn and Sao Paulo. They have done projects involving local artisans, communities and construction in dense, homegrown neighbourhoods such as Dharavi and Shivaji Nagar in Mumbai. Some of their work has been exhibited at MoMA (New York), MAK (Vienna), the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Chicago Architecture Biennial and a forthcoming one at Wayne State University Gallery, Detroit. They are presently involved in a study on circulatory urbanism exploring India’s uneven trajectories of  urbanization with the Forum for Mobile Lives, Paris. They have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian, Oxford University Press, Strelka Press, The New Village Press, Intellect, The Hindu, and several others. Matias has studied at LSE, Columbia and Tokyo Universities and Rahul has studied at J.N.U., Delhi and Cambridge University, UK.

TEAM

Shyam Kanle

Shyam Kanle works as a researcher and field operator with URBZ. He has run many businesses in Dharavi where he was born and raised. He has also been involved in conflict resolution and local politics for many years. He is a well respected and influential person in his community and is fluent in Marathi, Hindi and English.

Puneet Bareja

Designer, photographer and doodler based in Mumbai.