Vaishnavi is a zealous creative working in architecture with a curious photographic eye focusing on the built environment and it's inhabitants. Hailing from India, with a strong connection to her roots and community, she moved to Australia in 2016 and graduated from the University of New South Wales with a Masters of Architecture in 2018. She has also participated in green design workshops in Auroville, India and a computational design summer school at the Architectural Association, London.

Since 2018, Vaishnavi has been working at Architects Nicholas and Associates working on single residential and commercial projects from design through to construction participation. She was the project lead for the recently completed refurbishment of the bookshop institution ‘Gleebooks’ in Glebe.

As a means of self-education, with an interest in photography and love for residential architecture, Vaishnavi has been exploring Australian residential architecture through a personal research project called ‘Houses I Can’t Afford’. Hosted on Instagram and always a work in progress, HICA is a digital encyclopedia of houses in Australia, photographed on a weekly basis, realizing local architects and their work. Index: currently at 400 Houses.

Vaishnavi hopes to use this as a platform to further understand the meaning of ‘home’, the crisis of owning one in an ever-expanding urban realm, and to share her learnings of the way people live in Australia and around the world.