“Feminism has been and has to be like water, fluid. In some places, it’s fighting dowry, in others, fighting a witch hunt.”
— Kamla Bhasin
Narrative Biography
Jyoti Gupta is a New York City–based scholar-practitioner, author and educator.
Her current work is 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, relationships, and everyday life.
Over the last twenty years, her work has brought together media literacy, critical pedagogy, arts-based education, and collaborative learning to help educators, caregivers, and creators think more deeply children’s experiences around the themes of skin color and culture.
She credits her early experiences working with children’s organizations in India as a volunteer that shaped her commitment to participatory, arts-based, and child-centered learning practices that resist deficit-based approaches to education.
She is the founder and creative director of The Colo(u)rism Project, an interdisciplinary initiative that translates research on culture, visibility, and representation into educational tools, public engagement, and creative practice.
Born and raised in New Delhi, India, Gupta began examining questions of color, beauty, media, and visibility through both first- and second-hand experiences and academic inquiry during her graduate work at the New School University’s Media Studies program.
Her earliest public-facing project, ColorsOfBrown.org, launched in 2008 as a culmination of graduate work in media studies and functioned as a “counterpublic” media archive focused on colorism in South Asian communities and media culture. Alongside essays and analysis, she produced and conducted more than ten long-form video interviews with artists, scholars, performers, and public intellectuals, including Padma Shri awardee Shovana Narayan, art historian and scholar Parul D. Mukherji, actor and director Nandita Das, and numerous other thought leaders in art and media. In her early years, she met Professor Radhika Parameswaran, one of the earliest U.S. scholars to study colorism in the Indian subcontinent.
In 2013, Gupta received the Individual Artists Grant from the Houston Arts Alliance, supported by the City of Houston, to curate Putting the U in Color, an art and media culture exhibit examining colorism and visibility within South Asian communities and diasporic media.
The project created dialogue across communities of color and helped situate South Asian experiences of colorism within broader conversations about race, migration, and representation in the United States.
Her most recognized public education project to date is Different Differenter: An Activity Book about Skin Color, an independently published arts-based racial literacy toolkit for children ages 5–9. Crowdfunded, researched, designed, written, and self-published in 2019, the book combines storytelling, drawing, and guided conversation to help children think critically and creatively about skin color and difference.
The book has been recognized by The New York Times Wirecutter, Rethinking Schools, and McGraw Hill Wonders, and has been used in public, private, Montessori, and Waldorf schools, as well as museums and libraries in the United States and internationally, including the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and the National Gallery.
Before moving to the U.S., Gupta worked across advertising and nonprofit media. In India, she worked with agencies including J. Walter Thompson, McCann Erickson, and Havas, as well as in the art department of The Economic Times.
Long before developing her current frameworks around cultural literacy and childhood, Gupta worked with children and arts-based educational initiatives in India through organizations including The Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music And Culture Amongst Youth (SPIC MACAY), The Center for Advocacy Research (CFAR), and Mobile Creches.
In the United States, she later served as Executive Director of The Indus Entrepreneurs Houston and completed projects with the Asia Society Texas Center and the Bach Society Houston. During graduate school, she contributed writing to the South Asian Journalists Association forum and completed internships with Breakthrough and Love146.
Gupta holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School, an MA in Liberal Studies from CUNY Graduate Center, and a BFA in Applied Art (Visual Communication) from Delhi College of Art.
She lives in New York City and continues to develop frameworks, workshops, curriculum tools, and media projects that help children and adults engage culture with greater curiosity, complexity, and care.
“Would you think twice before talking to your child about daily hygiene, math, or their safety? Skin color, and by extension, social justice is no different.”
— Jyoti Gupta, Founder, The Colo(u)rism Project
