Khyati Nagar (she/her)

Hello! My name is Khyati, and I use she/her pronouns. In my role, I am excited to bring together transdisciplinary learner-centered, anti-oppressive pedagogies, and career education.

Let me share my non-linear career journey with you. I am a lifelong educator and learner and I have been teaching in higher education institutions in India and Canada since the last 22 years.

I hold a BFA in commercial and advertising arts from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, an MDes in Visual Communication Design from IIT Bombay, an MA in Digital Humanities from the University of Alberta, and a Certificate in Adult Education and Staff Training from Seneca College. I pursued a PhD at York University in the Department of Humanities, and successfully completed my minor and major comprehensive exams (with a focus on the History of Art and Science in India) in 2015. I also completed a diploma in Asian Studies at YorkU.

My graduate studies at YorkU were a life-changing experience as they made me hyper-aware of my positionality as a colonized subject with a colonized mind. It is one of the reasons my professional practice is rooted in feminist, anticolonial, and decolonial methodologies. As a sole-support parent in Canada, I had to pivot my career multiple times and my lived experience with solo-parenting, discrimination, and racism makes my professional practice social-justice centered. I understand how oppression and power work in organizations, systems, and communities.

As an educator, I have taught undergraduate design students at IIT Guwahati, was a technology mentor for faculty and staff at the Arts Resource Centre at the University of Alberta, a TA and then contract Faculty with Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University. Five years back I pivoted to career education while volunteering as a professional development mentor for newcomers to Canada at the Centre for Immigrant and Community Services in Scarborough. I worked as a WIL Supervisor and course developer for graduate international students at Lambton College where I developed and taught co-op prep courses for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and Dev Ops and Cloud Computing programs. This work got me interested in the ethical uses of AI.

Since 2014, I have been focusing on learning experience design and educational development in post-secondary education. I have two side gigs – one as a language consultant (हिन्दी Hindi-English), and another as a freelance educator for racialized high school students. I volunteer extensively with newcomers to Canada and in areas of mental health advocacy.

In my free time, I love cooking, making art, discovering KW trails, and spending time with my cats.