Prashanth Kamalakanthan ❁

is an Indian-American filmmaker, born in Tirupati, India, and raised in North Carolina. He is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where he directs the Production and Screenwriting Studies program. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Film,” his features include Have a Nice Life (2021), distributed by The Film Desk, New Strains (2023), which won a Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and is distributed by MEMORY, now streaming on Apple TV and YouTube Movies; and Removal of the Eye, playing now in theaters via Cinema Conservancy. His work has screened at Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, the Museum of the Moving Image, and dozens of festivals internationally. Prashanth holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BA from Duke University, where he was named Filmmaker of the Year. Prior to academia, he worked as an editor at The New York Times Video Desk and as a documentarian for Mother Jones, The Nation, and other outlets. He is a Sony/Gotham Marcie Bloom Fellow in Film and a jurist for NYU’s Purple List, currently based in Mt. Washington, Los Angeles.

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