About Proseterity
Proseterity is a publication run by a small team led by Aastha D, and released its first issue, 'ISSUE ZERO", in May 2021. Launched in unprecedented times, at the peak of a global pandemic, the publication is a creative and collaborative effort of writers, thinkers, designers and artists who endeavored to channel their grief and isolation, and bring comfort to the world with their words, ideas and questions. Proseterity has a Manifesto that serves as an ethical and visionary compass for its creators and board members. Readers and contributors are encouraged to read the Manifesto and Issues to gauge the literary and political ethos of this platform.
Proseterity publishes original work from writers across backgrounds and experience. We believe in the power of the written word in shaping futures, minds and lives. Proseterity is a space for one who writes with fire, urgency, truth and passion. So read, write, share and illuminate.
OurTeam
Aastha D. is an independent scholar, curator, designer and educator. She has a background in architecture, with a masters from Columbia University, New York. She works at the intersections of design, culture, and feminist theory. In the recent past, she has held editorial positions at publications in New York and Mumbai, edited books, curated exhibitions and events, and founded Prose with Aastha—a creative writing space that houses literary voices from around the world. She is an intersectional feminist, and her politics reflect in all her work across disciplines and media. Currently, she works between institutes in New York and Mumbai; contributes to publications of design and culture; teaches critical thinking and creative writing; conducts research; and curates publications; all while struggling to write her first book.
Aastha
Founder
Jery John
Art Director
Jery John is a self taught graphic designer based out of Mumbai. With a background in architecture Jery has been dabbling in storytelling, problem solving and communication through design for about a decade. He runs Pickle Studio out of Mumbai, where they have made a niche for themselves in the realm of identity building and brand development. He has worked on a variety of projects spanning product branding, signage, spatial identity, urban development campaigns to name a few. Jery believes that design despite its elitist history should be accessible for all. He is also a board game enthusiast and has been developing one on the side for a couple of months.
Jhanvi
Creative Intern
Jhanvi is pursuing Strategic Design Management and is a Creative Intern at Proseterity. She is really passionate about Fashion and Luxury. She has a flair for creativity, and her interests lie in strategising , creative problem solving and design.
Rachel
Creative Intern
Rachel is a Media graduate and a Creative Intern at Proseterity. She is incredibly passionate about diversity in storytelling, especially in animation and YA literature.
OurEditorialBoard
María Alejandra
Linares Trelles
María Alejandra Linares Trelles is an architect from Lima – Peru, currently based in the U.S. She works across design, research, writing, and curation to explore architecture from a sociopolitical perspective. She is interested in addressing themes around ecology, environmental justice, memory, and cultural identities, with a decolonial approach—her research on indigenous representations on cartographies of Peru subverts impositions of conventional maps. In the past, she has designed the new Visitor Center for Machu Picchu archeological site; has worked at the Office for Political Innovation (New York) and studio Llonazamora (Lima). Additionally, she has taught at Pratt Institute (New York), The New School (New York), and has been a Research Scholar at Columbia University. She holds a Professional Degree in Architecture from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and a Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University, New York.
She is an amateur photographer, enjoys watching old movies, and buys new books before she finishes reading the ones she already has."
Joseph Sgambati III
With professional degrees in architecture and journalism, Joseph has a desire to explore the intersection of beauty, design, and politics. His work in architecture, interior design, and data visualization has sought to enrich the lives of others with visual communication and storytelling through design. He also engages in dialogue with other artisans, makers, and thinkers through his writing in Metropolis Magazine. When he is not practicing, Joseph teaches visual communication, theory, and design at the collegiate level. It is his core belief that individuals are responsible for continued learning to become informed global citizens.
"I was wiping my groceries off before the pandemic."
Marty Wood
Marty Wood is a writer, critic, and educator interested in the critical intersections between art, architecture, and technology. He has been building communities for over 15 years, founding Resonant City as a platform for urban, aesthetic and political conversations. In 2011, he helped start the Bay Area Public School as a forum for continuing dialogues coming out of Occupy Oakland. Marty studied communications at San Francisco State University and holds an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program. He has published reviews, essays, and criticism in a variety of publications, most recently in Metropolis and The Architect’s Newspaper. He is currently the Director of Communications at Move38 and a visiting professor at Pratt Institute. He lives and works in New York, NY.
Abubakr Ali
Abubakr Ali is an architect, researcher and writer. Originally from Khartoum Sudan, he is currently based in Washington DC. He holds a Masters Degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, where he was awarded the Arguments Honor Awards and the William Kinne Travelling Fellowship. His work in Sudan, and after, is rooted in an awareness of the social, economic and technological contexts of place. This meant a rigorous questioning of the medium of construction as a vehicle to enact meaningful change. This line of questioning, plays out possible scenarios of success for architectural interventions while bluntly confronting their efficacy, and challenges prescribed boundaries of the profession. Through multiple mediums including essays, lectures and design projects Abubakr continues his exploration of the relationship between buildings and their inhabitants—testing tenuous boundaries separating work lives and personal lives; using architectural configurations to exacerbate the dominance of one over the other; expanding “architectural knowledge” beyond its physical origins. His writing has been featured in publications such as the New York Review of Architecture.
Sunaina
Sunaina is a designer, architect, researcher and writer whose critical tendencies lie between architecture, theory, history and technology. Having grown up in Ahmedabad, a home to some of the finest Indo-Islamic mosques and tombs and iconic modernist works, with an architect father, she had always been surrounded by conversations and adventures in architecture. But, it took a gap year spent in Cambridge UK, the Tuscan countryside, travelling in Spain and living in Seville, working on a Kibbutz with chickens in Israel, and other misadventures for her to realise that she looks at the world through architecture. Sunaina got her Bachelors in Architecture at CEPT University and later joined the Architectural Association in London to do a Masters in History and Critical Thinking in Architecture, followed by a stint in Switzerland at the studio of architect Mario Botta then did an MS.AAD from Columbia University. She spends time thinking, reading and discussing architecture and better the socio-political forces and ethos that govern and drive the field.
Sohnee Harshey
Sohnee has a penchant for the past and the future which she has pursued and thrived in through university education in history, social work, and women's studies. Her worldview is shaped most significantly by a slow, non-metropolitan childhood in central India, which continues to inform both her academic and artistic pursuits. Sohnee has fieldwork experiences with a multitude of vulnerable groups—at-risk women and children in Mumbai, community health workers in Chhattisgarh, sex workers in rural Madhya Pradesh, and forest-dependent communities in Western India—which have strengthened her feminist consciousness and desire for collaborative work. After a brief stint as an educator at TISS, Mumbai, Sohnee became part of Economic and Political Weekly's digital initiative, Engage, which reimagines academic research in more accessible ways. Currently, she manage communication and advocacy work for a feminist non-profit in the education space. Sohnee is invested in thinking about sites of knowledge through questions of gendered labour, climate justice, productivity, language, and memory. In an ideal 36-hour day, I would like to do all of this through academia, grassroots work, and art.
She is generally happy, an enthusiastic story-teller, a potential illustrator, a trained-but-out-of-practice dancer, a decent phone-photographer, a novice baker, a slow-and-meticulous shopper, and an obsessive cleaner+organiser.
John 13: 34 NKJV “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”
Introduction, page 3; Music and Faith, Jonathan Arnold.