Nashin Mahtani

Nashin Mahtani is an architectural theorist and designer investigating the interplay of software aesthetics, ecological governance and social behaviour to advocate for environmental justice.

Nashin Mahtani is currently the director of Yayasan Peta Bencana (Disaster Map Foundation), a South-East Asian non-profit developing humanitarian technologies for community-led disaster co-management. She co-led the expansion of the life-saving plaform PetaBencana.id, from a real-time flood mapping platform serving 50 million people in Indonesia to a multi-hazard mapping platform serving over 350 million people in South East Asia. Supporting the development of one of the largest open source software projects for climate adaptation, her activism is driven by theory, scholarship and ethnographic research. 

With a background in architecture, Nashin’s applied and research investigations center around water polities and infrastructures, communication and media philosophies, and epigenetic adaptations. She is also principal co-investigator of MERA, a research and design collective investigating the future of governance structures foregrounded in ecological homeostasis. 

Nashin is listed in the Forbes Asia ’30 Under 30’ 2021, Semi-finalist Global Citizen Prize: Cisco Youth Leadership Award in 2019; Southeast Asian Women Leader, YSEALI in 2020; and Women Innovator, Information Society Innovation Fund in 2018.

In March 2023, Nashin Mahtani also participated in the Living Cities Landscape Lab, a new initiative by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, and the keynote is available to stream on demand below.