Niyati Dave is a writer and curator based in New Delhi. She is currently Curator and Program Manager at Khoj where she leads Does the Blue Sky Lie? Testimonies of Air’s Toxicities, a 3 year project that explores the troubled ecology of Delhi’s air, along with working on other projects about ecology and the climate crisis. She studied Art History and Museum Studies at Smith College, USA. At various points between 2013–2015, she worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as an archaeological volunteer at the Ancient Agora of Athens, and a researcher at the Smithsonian Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. In 2015, she won a travel grant to conduct research about place-making, collective memory, the act of pilgrimage and the aesthetics of tourism in Shikoku and Koyasan, Japan. After returning to India, she was part of the Urban Fellows Programme at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, which supplemented her interest in ecology, public spaces, and urbanism with questions of citizenship, access, and governance. Before joining Khoj, she worked at the Economic and Political Weekly, India’s leading academic journal, and as the Communications Officer at the Centre for Policy Research for the Tacit Urban Research Network, a project conducting collaborative research on urban informality. A common thread running through her career has been the act of communicating complex ideas in an accessible manner. At Khoj, she is committed to deploying that principle to use creative and affective interventions that help disrupt collective complacency about the spaces we occupy and the knowledge systems that govern them.

Image credits: Courtesy of the contributor