Meet Jyoti.
Educator, author, founder.
VISION
I analyze and create media that make children heard and visible across educational resources and learning environments.
By changing the way we communicate, design, and learn and teach, we can build more thoughtful, respectful, and joyful learning environments in children’s homes, schools, media, and communities.
Children are clear-eyed and brilliant thinkers. They are the reason my work works.
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Different Differenter is an arts-and-crafts-based indie book for 3-8 year olds and their grown ups. I crowdfunded it in 2016, and self-published in 2019.
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I saw a wide gap in skin color-related resources for 3-8 year olds and their adults. I had already been studying skin color for 10+ years so I decided I would try!
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If I had to pick one, I’d say that it put puts children at the center and creates space for them to engage and lead the conversations in a critically conscious way.
Rethinking Schools
McGraw Hills Wonders
As seen in
The Juggernaut
I started with skin color.
In 2012 TEDxWomen approached me for what would soon become my first public talk since 4th grade!
I said yes, but what I didn’t know then, was how definitively focused, if somewhat altered, my media and art practice would become over the next few years.
Click below to watch one of the origin stories of my decade-long independent work on identity.
Then the questions got bigger.
Continuing on questions around identity, I’m now working on my 2nd children’s book, entitled, Yesterday, Nexterday: An Activity Book about Culture.
Grounded in the belief that children do not simply inherit culture, they actively interpret, repurpose, and create new ways to think about it through play, media, language, and relationships in everyday life.
Original frameworks, and resources for educators, program directors, and Edtech teams to follow, so stay tuned!
Let’s make a bigger tent. Join me!
Make art for literacy!
Access a free skin color-related activity for your PD, leadership cohort, class, art room, library, afterschool program, or home.
Want to book me for a talk?
I am available for speaking engagements at youth organizations, schools, and higher ed campuses. Even leadership of color cohorts!
Fill out this intake form. →
Cultural visibility FAQs!
Have questions or engage in cultural visibility work? Amplify my work, collaborate, or introduce me to co-conspirators.
Email Jyoti →
I am an Indian-born, New York–based scholar-practitioner, writer, and educator focused on engaging children, youth, and their grown-ups on discourse around cultural visibility.
I have facilitated workshops and public conversations in schools, universities, museums, literary and cultural forums, including at TEDxWomen and the Jaipur Literature Festival. My work and commentary have appeared in Bitch! Media, The Washington Post, The Juggernaut, and Radio Free Brooklyn. My first children’s book, Different Differenter: An Activity Book about Skin Color (2019), has been included as an educational resource by The New York Times Wirecutter, Rethinking Schools, Social Justice Books, and McGraw Hill Wonders.
I am the founder of The Colo(u)rism Project (2012), an independent initiative that has expanded into an inquiry into childhood and identity formation. My first public engagement work, Putting the U in Color, a month-long art and media exhibit examining colorism within South Asian communities, was funded by an Houston Arts Alliance via the City of Houston.
Prior to going independent in 2012, i worked in advertising, nonprofit leadership, and consulting, including J. Walter Thompson, McCann Erickson, TiE Houston, where I served as Executive Director, and creative projects with nonprofits, including Breakthrough NYC, and Asia Society Texas Center. I hold master’s degrees in Media Studies and Liberal Studies from The New School and CUNY Graduate Center, respectively, and a BFA in Applied Art (Visual Communication) from Delhi College of Art. I live in Washington Heights with my teenage son, who enjoys flute, writing, and designing aerospace video-game things.