How do you curate the lineup for India's premier data visualization conference and community?

VizChitra is India's community-driven conference and platform for data visualization. It brings together people across design, journalism, research, policy, and technology to explore how data and storytelling can shape perspectives and drive change. The flagship conference in Bangalore is the annual anchor for this community.

India's data visualization community is scattered across industries and disciplines, often solving similar problems in isolation, without a shared space to exchange ideas or references. Little cross-pollination means that diverse voices, approaches, and forms of the practice rarely meet. Data viz in India is happening in newsrooms, research labs, civic tech, design studios, and classrooms, but there's been no common ground to bring it together, or to surface how wide the practice actually is.

I co-lead Discourse and Editorial Team for VizChitra's flagship conference, helping shape the editorial direction and themes for both the 2025 and 2026 editions of the conference. This included curating the program across tools and disciplines, working to bring together creatives and practitioners across industries, grounded in VizChitra's mission to build a data visualization community full of diverse perspective.

• Shaped the editorial spine of VizChitra around four pillars: community, craft, tools, and work.
• Co-designed the program for VizChitra 2025 and 2026 in Bangalore, with sessions that cut across tools, roles, and domains.
• Built a consistent emphasis on Indian work and voices, from newsrooms and civic-tech to independent data art and public-interest research.
• Brought in speakers, facilitators and instructors that expand the community's traditional understanding of "data viz".
• Emceed the inaugural conference and set the tone for how VizChitra shows up as a community space for all attendees.

The first edition of the conference brought together over 450 data visualisation practitioners and enthusiasts across India, and has since become a dedicated gathering point for India's data visualization community.

The entire VizChitra team can be found here.