Swati Piparsania

Swati Piparsania (b. Bhilai, India) is a designer and researcher based in New York City, currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in the Department of Industrial Design. Her expanded practice explores the complex relationship between the social body, the spatial body, and the surveilled body. Drawing from theoretical frameworks such as embodied pedagogy, relational aesthetics, body politics, and post-Fordism, her work critiques social systems of power and governance, foregrounding racial and economic subjectivity through concepts like perversion, corruption, and legibility.

She utilizes frameworks of architectural interiors, sculpture, and dance to develop a series of designed propositions that critique and speculate a body’s interactions, movements and gestures. She builds floors, mattresses, shoes, and pants that inscribe the dynamics for performance as well as its dysfunction. These objects elevate, bend, hide and restrict parts of the body, creating possibilities to unlearn conscious and subconscious disciplines of movement. By choreographing an unfamiliarity with one’s own body she expands our understanding of the body as a site of dissent, resistance, and intimacy.

MFA in 3D Design at Cranbrook Academy of Art
Diploma in Furniture and Spacial Design from Srishti School of Art Design and Technology