Jyoti Hosagrahar is deputy director for the World Heritage Centre at UNESCO. She leads the implementation of the Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation, the World Heritage Cities Programme and the World Heritage and Sustainable Development. She is also responsible for the Earthen Architecture Programme and the Culture 2030 Indicators for measuring culture in the 2030 Agenda across all the cultural conventions and recommendations. From May 2016 to November 2018 she served as director of the division for creativity at UNESCO.

She was a professor and director of the SUI Lab at GSAPP, Columbia University, New York from 2005 to 2016 and UNESCO chair in culture, habitat, and sustainable development at Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in Bangalore, India where she was also chair of the Ph.D. program between 2012 and 2016. She was also the founder-director of Sustainable Urbanism International (SUI) an NGO in Bangalore, India from 2003 to 2016.

She holds a Ph.D. in architecture and urbanism from the University of California, Berkeley.