Darshita Jain

Darshita Jain is a Chicago-based poet, art critic, an arts administrator and a voracious consumer of content, matched only by her need to critically converse about the said content.

Her work takes the shape of exhibition direction, art journalism, writing, performance, and non-profit arts administration.

Darshita is the co-founder of Povera, one of the first spoken word poetry collectives in Gujarat, India. Povera focused on monthly spoken word poetry events with a social justice lens, with expansion to mentoring, teaching and workshop building.

She has written for Chicago Reader, Newcity, The Adroit Journal, Arts Letters and Numbers and was one of the founding Literary editors for SAIC’s Fnews Magazine, Chicago.

Since moving to Chicago in 2018, her poetry has appeared in Hooligan Magazine, Tint Journal, Alipore post, A letter, a poem a home : Anthology, and more.

Some of her most recent performances include Read Some Shit, Arts Letters and Numbers, Tuesday Funk, Chicago as well as a performance collaboration with musician and producer Jill DeGroot at DePaul University.

Darshita earned her Bachelor’s in Fashion and production from the National Institute of Fashion Technology where she studied design, history of design, marketing, clothing production, draping and pattern making. After studying and working in fashion for 2 years, Darshita started writing critically about the industry and labour exploitation.

She received her master’s degree in New Arts Journalism at the School of the Art Institute in 2020. Her thesis, The Poetry Playbook, documents the ephemeral exercises and safe spaces that happen in a poetry workshop around the city of Chicago through interviews, essays and documenting poetry workshop exercises.

Born and raised in a family of educators in India, she has studied dance, fashion, production, marketing, and art journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus on social justice and the publishing world. Darshita has been writing and developing tools to educate and build a critical lens to life and culture for the last 8 years.

Darshita currently works as the Director of Outreach and Artist Programs at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago. Previously she was the Director of Programming at Woman Made Gallery, Chicago.