From cultural
value to monetary value

As a little girl, I spent summers in Tanjore, India playing amongst the hanging looms of dyed fabric on the balcony of my grandfather's house. He had taken his family out of poverty by building a textile dye business. My sister and I would visit the factory and watch, transfixed, as workers mixed fabrics and dyes in great vats. Outside our bungalow, men stood weaving silk saris — one end of the loom disappearing far into the distance.

That image has never left me. And in some ways, everything I have done since has been a conversation with it.

I built my professional career in finance — a decade at Goldman Sachs structuring bespoke financing solutions for emerging market sovereigns and corporates, and then as Managing Director at Standard Bank, where I built a credit structuring business for Sub-Saharan Africa from the ground up. The work was important. But it didn't feel tangible.

So I followed the pull. I attended Parsons School of Design. I apprenticed in patternmaking and textile surface design at leading New York couture ateliers and fashion houses — building hands-on understanding of garment construction and luxury production from the inside. I found the tangibility I had been missing. But I missed the impact.

The question that has driven my entire second chapter is this: why do culture and capital so rarely speak to each other well? And what happens when someone who has lived inside both decides to build the bridge?

For the past decade I have been building that bridge — advising the UN on textile supply chain restructuring in Mongolia, founding an impact investment fund, serving as Interim Executive Director of a scaling nonprofit, and advising creative founders on how to build something commercially viable without losing the thing that made it worth building.

Culture and Capital Studio is where that work becomes a practice. Where the thesis becomes a business. And where the conversation continues.