I’m Niya, 26, painter by trade, observer by habit.

I grew up inside my parents’ interior-design studio, mixing paint for sample boards and shifting furniture twice my size. An unplanned apprenticeship in how colour and form change the way people feel in a room. Design school in Bangalore (Srishti) sharpened my craft; a postgraduate year at London’s Royal College of Art taught me to ask why before how.

Took me a bit to get there but, I realised I care most when art does a job. When it leaves the frame and says something useful.

That thinking led to For The Record. A late-night chat about AI became a canvas of “model weights.” A snapshot of a Bloomberg keyboard grew into a study of the quiet hardware that keeps global finance humming. I kept noticing how the toughest wins, exits, IPOs, first apartments get one press release and then disappear. At the same time, I’m learning first-hand how hard it is to lift a business off the ground while helping push my family’s interiors firm into its next chapter. The more young founders I meet, the clearer it feels: milestones deserve better evidence.

So today I split my time between three tracks:

Scaling and steering the family business towards bigger, art-led space design projects.

Art direction – setting visual tone for brands, spaces, and the occasional stage.

For The Record – where I translate milestone stories into canvas, with bigger plans in sight.

Off the clock, my other studio is the kitchen where I test-drive recipes until they’re restaurant-ready, always with this mix of indie grooves in the background. Listen to it here