Vandini Mehta received her undergraduate degree from School of Architecture CEPT, Ahmedabad, India (1997) and an MS in Architecture from University of California, Berkeley, USA with a specialization in Environmental design in developing countries. She was awarded the department block grant for all three semesters at Berkeley and served as a teaching and research assistant at the university. She also spent a semester at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia on an exchange study. Her academic and research interests include investigations of urban histories and geographies as revealed in the current neo-liberal times, film and space especially of current Bollywood cinema and also spatial issues dealing with the Indian rural development sector. She has presented her research work in different international conferences and is currently a visiting faculty in the Urban Design Program of SPA (School of Planning and Architecture), New Delhi.
Her professional practice included non-profit community based planning and architectural work with SevaMandir (Udaipur, India). At SevaMandir, as an Architect and design Consultants, she designed a Block Office and Community Centre in Kotra, a village Community Centre using participatory design method and local eco- friendly materials, and a showroom for the handicrafts made by village women in Udaipur City. Besides these she was involved in a few research and writing projects and finally in heading a funding initiative with PoonamAbbi, called Friends of SevaMandir, in New York. She is currently a member in the Executive Council of SevaMandir.
During 5 years in New York she gained experience in high-end residential architectural work and some office and gallery renovations at McBride and Associates Architects along with two Tibetan projects - a monastery and a school for the Vikramsila Foundation in India & Nepal. Later, she joined Magnusson Architecture & Planning (MAP) as a Project Architect/Manager for mixed use and mixed income housing and planning projects. During her work at MAP in New York City her team was awarded the 2005 AIA New York Housing Design Award for Melrose Commons, a revitalization plan of an inner city neighborhood in NYC and 2009 Big Apple Brownfield Awards for the Affordable Housing Award category for Parkview Commons, a brownfield redevelopment housing project. She is also an accredited LEED professional (a US Green Building Council accreditation) and led MAP’s team proposal of Melrose Commons which was a qualifying entry for the Pilot Program of LEED for Neighborhood Development, 2007. Since 2007, she has started her own consultancy firm called Studio VanRo in partnership with Rohit Raj Mehndiratta.