Jasmine Vasandani
MATUP Class of 2016–
Co-Creator, Digital Bazaar NEW INC.
Jasmine is a business and design strategist with nine years of work experience, abroad and locally, in the fields of urbanism, cooperatives, business development, social entrepreneurship, information science, civic engagement and art curating. Before coming to The New School, Jasmine received a Bachelor’s in Art History. She graduated from the MA in Theories of Urban Practice in the 2016.
During her time at Parsons and after graduating, Jasmine was the program manager for the nation’s largest government funded initiative toward worker cooperatives at the NYC Department of Small Business Services. In the last few years Jasmine has been busy co-creating a digital bazaar platform at NEW INC, which is The New Museum’s Design and Technology Incubator. At NEW INC, Jasmine has been involved in practice design strategy, entrepreneurship, cultural production while building her project and working in collaboration with key partners. “My work as the Program Manager for the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative at the NYC Department of Small Business Services helped spread the model of worker cooperatives to thousands of New Yorkers, particularly immigrant communities and women of color.
Currently, her work at The New Museum allows her to use design strategy as a methodology to explore the potentials of the South Asian diaspora population as a community that is spread out across the globe. Additionally, Jasmine’s project at New Inc is allowing her to create a practice from the ground up that is feasible, desirable, and viable.
Jasmine writes: “Interested in switching career paths [after obtaining Bachelor’s in Art History], I decided to apply to Parsons to pursue studies in the MA in Theories of Urban Practice. While enrolled, I was able to practice design and urban theory in the classroom and transform those skills into actionable strategies in the many projects I worked on outside the classroom. Overall, my experience at Parsons was enriching also because I was a self-starter and used all of my classroom knowledge to apply it to real-life experiences.”