The Impart & Nalli Fellowships

A visual artist, curator and design entrepreneur, Noorjehan Bilgrami has played a pioneering role in the revival of hand-block printing, weaving and natural dyes in Pakistan. She founded KOEL in 1978, establishing it as a centre for craft innovation, and since 1990, Gallery KOEL has served as an important platform for emerging and established artists. Bilgrami was the curator of the Pakistan Pavilions at Expo 2020 Dubai and Expo 2025 Osaka.  In 2023, she was conferred the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz by the President of Pakistan for her contributions to arts and crafts. She was also the Artist-in-Residence at the Islamic Museum of Art, Design and Culture, Shangri La, Honolulu. Bilgrami is a founding member of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and served as its first Executive Director.

An independent researcher and designer, Paola Manfredi has lived and worked in South Asia for over four decades, collaborating with master artisans and organisations engaged in textiles, crafts development and conservation. With a background in ethnology, her research explores the history of textile exchanges between East and West. She has worked extensively with artisans specialising in aari embroidery in Delhi, chikankari in Lucknow, crewel embroidery in Kashmir, kantha embroidery in Bangladesh, and other embroidered textile traditions in Pakistan. Combining scholarly research with design practice, Manfredi advocates for the preservation and contemporary relevance of South Asia’s rich embroidery traditions through education, training and artisan-led innovation. Manfredi has curated and lectured extensively on textile heritage and is currently leading the Chikankari Archive Project, an initiative to document historic textiles in public and private collections worldwide. She is the author of numerous publications on textile history, including the seminal book Chikankari: A Lucknawi Tradition.

A researcher and educator in the fields of crafts and design, Prof. Dr. Toolika Gupta is the Director of the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design (IICD), Jaipur, and Dean of Design at Vishvakarma Skills University, Jaipur. She holds a Ph.D. in History of Arts (Dress and Textiles) from the University of Glasgow and her academic work includes a PhD fellowship with the Textile Research Centre, Copenhagen, and specialised training in Archaeological Textiles at the University of Oxford. She began her career as a designer before moving into design education at NIFT, New Delhi, and later taught at NID and Pearl Academy as visiting faculty. In 2016, she co-founded the Textiles and Clothing Research Centre (TCRC), New Delhi, to advance indigenous research in textiles and material culture, where she now serves as Chairperson. She has written and co-edited several research publications and contributes widely to scholarship and public discourse on the histories of dress and textiles.

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.

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.

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.