Vyjayanthi Rao is an anthropologist, writer and curator. An ethnographer of urban life in India and elsewhere, she also writes regularly about art and the role of creativity in urban life. Her work explores speculation and architecture and her research combines ethnographic fieldwork with mapping, film-making and other forms of visual research. She is the author of numerous articles and is the co-editor of two books, Speculation Now: Essays and Artworks (Duke University Press, 2015) and Occupy All Streets: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro (UR Books, 2016). Vyjayanthi is a senior editor of the journal Public Culture, a teacher of Urban Studies at the Spitzer School of Architecture (CUNY), a Co-Director of the non-profit Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research and a member of an artist collective called Samooha, exploring practices of self-reliance, self-making and self-building, vital to cultures fostered within informal settlements across the globe.