Nidhip Mehta

Nidhip Mehta is currently the Head of the School of Design at Pearl Academy, one of India’s premier design institutes. He grew up and completed his education in the United States, and had a twelve-year career as a practicing architect. In 2009, he and his wife made the decision to shift permanently to India. Although he had taught design in the US before, this paradigm shift of PLACE coincided with an equally significant realignment of CAREER, and he immediately became a full-time design educator.

Nidhip found opportunities to teach at India’s best institutes of Design and Fashion. After a brief return to India to complete a Masters in Architecture Theory, he joined full-time at Pearl Academy in 2014 in the department of Interior Architecture. He steadily got opportunities to take on broader responsibilities, and in 2015 he was given the role of School Head for the School of Design, a role which covers the academic administration of all design courses at Pearl’s campuses across India.

Some of Nidhip’s areas of professional interests include speculative design, design theory, urban design and urban transport, and trans-disciplinary design education. He did research on the behavior of Millennials, particularly within the scope of design education, which has been a tremendous help in his current role. He believes that design education should be flexible, adaptive, and focused on the mindset of the student psyche, even when that clashes completely with that of the teacher.