Preeti Gopinath is Associate Professor and the founding Director of the newly launched Textiles MFA program at Parsons, The New School. A graduate of the 5-year Professional Education Program of the National Institute of Design (India), Preeti is an internationally experienced textile designer, CAD expert and an acclaimed educator with over 25 years of international experience in both industry and the classroom. She is also a Bharatanatyam dancer, an actor and a philosopher with a special interest in Plato and Vedanta studies; all of which inform her career and that she seamlessly integrates into her life.

Preeti’s textiles practice ranges from creative textile design to craft research and managing fabric development for several major textile companies in India, Canada and USA. Her experience as an educator includes being a founding faculty member at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India, teaching at George Brown College and Sheridan Institute in Canada, and teaching in the Textile Development & Marketing department at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York. Since joining the School of Fashion at Parsons (New York), in January 2018, Preeti has developed a unique graduate-level textiles program that sits at the intersection of craft and technology, on the bedrock values of sustainability, social justice and wellbeing. Working closely with design visionary Li Edelkoort and team of extraordinary faculty, Preeti leads the Textiles MFA program which aims to prepare global citizens to do meaningful work in the world through making and designing textiles to meet the realities of the 21st century. Her students have developed textiles that address a variety of issues including injustices around migration, climate change, sustainability and the conservation of traditional crafts. The success of Preeti’s unique pedagogical methodology is evidenced by the award winning textiles that her students have produced, already bringing home honors and global recognition to Parsons in the field of textiles, design, sustainability and materiality.