Ms. Nishtha Jain is a filmmaker known for her critically appraised, multi-award-winning documentaries like Gulabi Gang (2012), Lakshmi and Me (2008), and City of Photos (2005). She holds a postgraduate degree in mass communication from AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, New Delhi, and a postgraduate diploma in film direction from FTII, Pune. She’s a fellow of the Sundance Documentary Fund and the American Film Show Case. Her films have been widely screened in international film festivals, art-house cinemas, schools, and universities and broadcast on international TV networks. She has served as a juror at several prestigious film festivals and held master classes in international universities.

As a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, Ms. Jain is working on a triptych that looks at the present and past dynamics of three industrial townships—Rochester (New York), Naihati (West Bengal), and Gurugram (Delhi-NCR), with a focus on images and sounds of work, the memories that persist in the sites of abandonment, and different relationships between capital and labor. While Rochester is marked by uncertainty and Naihati by gloom, Gurugram presents itself as a glistening dystopia. The triptych will create an experience that while maintaining the specificity of each city will also show glimpses of shared experiences and common histories.

Ms. Jain is also teaching a course called Feminist Documentary Practice in South Asia: Film Form and Digital Democracy. The course looks at the works of filmmakers starting from the early 80s to see how technological, economic, social, and political changes impacted the form and content of documentaries made by women in the last three decades.