Vishnupriya Narayanan trained in textile design, at the National Institute of Design, Ahmadabad. She began her professional career working withblock printers in Jaipur in developing a range of Home Decor for the ‘Maison& Objet’ fair, 2011.Through a project sponsored by IGNCA, Ministry of Culture in collaboration with NID, she spentfive years studying the traditional textiles, indigenous back tension looms, dying practices and other indigenous practices of over 50 tribes in four North Eastern states of India (Assam, Manipur, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh)

More recently she has been teaching design process and design thinking to both engineers and designers across various institutes such as National Institute of Design, IIT Gandhinagar, and SEAS Ahmedabad University.Vishnupriya was part of an initiative titled ‘Sustainability for tomorrow’s consumers’ organized by the World Economic Forum in Delhi, 2008, which crystallized her inclination towards understanding sustainable craft models, indigenous techniques and appreciating the value of ‘waste’. She has documented some of the living crafts of India, especially the Khadi (organic cotton) tradition of Ponduru, Andhra Pradesh and also mapped block-printing techniques in Gujarat for Craft Revival Trust.

She is interested in the ways in which ‘making’ enhances ‘learning’, and enjoys a hands-on approach to design, as she demonstrated in a project using paper waste to create paper tiles. She continues to explore the field of design as a practitioner, researcher and as a design educator.