Juhi Pandey, has worked with more than 1000 traditional artisans across the country with the main aim of facilitating processes to build identity and ownership through the development of local economic and traditional value chains using indigenous fibres and natural dyes as the basis of textile and craft development. Human-centric and a process based approach has helped her to study, learn and work with varied communities finding solutions relevant to the present context.

She has a career spanning across a little more than 2 decades starting of as the first ever designer to be hired by one of the oldest textile companies of India – Century Textiles and Industries Pvt Ltd in Mumbai, India, she then went on to working in the high-street fashion industry.

After 8 years of being the in the mainstream industrial sector, she switched to the education and crafts sector as a facilitator, innovator and academic.

She facilitated the set-up a children and women organisation, Tara Trust Goa in 2011 aiming at education and empowerment of the marginalised through art and design interventions. She has been the Director of Khamir Craft Resource Center, facilitating the development of local craft value chain, in local indigenous wool and indigenous leather through the already established local value chain of Kala Cotton by Khamir in Kutch. She has been the Director of Hatheli Sansthan, the craft enterprise of Barefoot College Tilonia, Rajasthan, India, the oldest social development organisation of the country and the Technical Head for Nila House Jaipur, a CSR initiative of JCB India in Rajasthan.

She is currently the Centre Head for the Centre of Excellence for Khadi(www.coek.in), in Shillong, in North East of India, working closely towards the innovation and development of the wild eri silk of the region through handspun and handwoven processes with some of the oldest Khadi institutions of the region.

She is a honorary advisor of a dignified livelihoods collective for India called Vikalp Sutra(www.sutra.vikalsangam.org), working towards creating a Right to Dignified Livelihood policy in the future.

She is a regular visiting faculty with NID-Ahmedabad and some of the NIFT institutions and other design institutions of India for more than a decade. She mentors in subject areas of Design Thinking & Processes ; Social Design ; Sustainable & Equitable Development Processes through Design.

After spending 8 years in the mainstream industrial sector, her experiences and learnings made her want to get back to her main passions which was education and crafts.