The Impart & Nalli Fellowships

An art historian who is also a designer, Dr Annapurna Garimella’s research focuses on late medieval Indic architecture and the history of vernacular visual and built cultures in postcolonial India. She is the Managing Trustee of the Art, Resources and Teaching Trust, which conducts independent research and teaching on art, architecture, design and craft histories. She also heads Jackfruit Research and Design, an organisation with a specialised portfolio of design, research and curation.

Mayank Mansingh Kaul is an independent researcher and curator with a focus on post-independence histories of textiles in India. He is a graduate in Textile Design from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Kaul has worked in cultural policy and curated seminal exhibitions including New Traditions: Inspirations & Influences in Indian Textiles, 1947–2017 (Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, 2018) and Pehchaan: Enduring Themes in Indian Textiles (Devi Art Foundation and National Museum, New Delhi, 2025). He edited the Marg publication Cloth and India: 1947–2015. Kaul is based in New Delhi, India.

Vice Chairperson of Nalli Silks and a Harvard Business School alum, Lavanya Nalli has previously worked at McKinsey & Company, and Myntra, before rejoining the Nalli Group of Companies. She leads the e-commerce and private-label efforts at Nalli, and has been named by Forbes as ‘Asia’s Women to Watch’, profiled in ET’s ‘40 under 40’, and is also an Aspen Fellow and YPO member.

Uthra Rajgopal is a Curator and Researcher specialising in South Asian textiles. She has formerly held roles at the V&A Museum and the Whitworth, where she received the UK Art Fund New Collecting Award to build a collection of contemporary textile art by South Asian women artists. She has curated several major international exhibitions including Beyond Borders (2017) and Fragments of Our Time for the British Textile Biennial (2023). Uthra has worked with handloom weavers, embroiderers, and dyers, mainly in Tamil Nadu and Kutch, lectures widely, and mentors textile artists. She is currently a PhD VC scholarship candidate at Nottingham Trent University.

Editor-in-Chief of beautifulhomes.com and Senior Advisor for Design at Asian Paints, Manju Sara Rajan is also the co-founder of KAASH, Bengaluru. She has previously served as the CEO of the Kochi-Biennale Foundation from 2016 to 2018 and as the Editor of Architectural Digest, India. She is a career journalist, with varied experience in international and national media. Rajan started as a reporter with Time magazine in Hong Kong, before relocating to India as a correspondent in its New Delhi bureau. She left Time in 2004 and moved to Mumbai to work with The Indian Express, and later Mint Wall Street Journal as the Deputy National Features Editor. She was also part of the team that launched the national news magazine OPEN. Before becoming Editor of Condé Nast India’s fourth title in the country, Rajan was Features Editor of Vogue.

Representing the Impart, where she worked as Special Projects Lead, Mandara anchored Impart and Nalli Fellowship 2024–25 in its initial stages, and provided support and advice through the cycle. In her present role at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, Mandara oversees the museum’s collection, library and digitisation projects. Her previous work at MAP included digitising the textile collection in a collaborative effort with Microsoft to create INTERWOVEN and at Impart she led the Timeline of Art project. She holds a master’s in Performance Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and a bachelor’s in English Honours from Christ University, Bengaluru. She is interested in questions about gender, labour, performance and popular culture.