L. SOMI ROY is a New York-based film and media curator specializing in Asian, Asian American, and non-fiction films. He is an arts producer with a special interest in transnational media projects and local and regional cultures.

He is currently working on the Appalshop Indonesia Documentary Exchange Project, which brings together documentary filmmakers from Appalachia, Java, Kalimantan and Sulawesi. The exchange, now in its second year, grew out of Appalshop in China (2000-2005), his region-to-region transnational media artists exchange between Appalachia and the mountain provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.

Somi has curated film and media exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and for Public Television. His exhibitions such as The Tibet Film Festival and the First US Festival of Vietnamese Cinema have toured nationally in the US. His exhibitions have been seen in China, India and Indonesia.

Somi's Art Video:Video Art at the Continental Atrium from 1992-1995 was New York's first on-going exhibition of public program of video art. He ran the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and in 2001, he organized Digital Flaherty, the first interactive conference in the US on the theory, aesthetics and content of digital art. he is currently developing DigitizeManipur, a preservation and digitization project in collaboration with the University of Kentucky and the New York Public Library for the endangered medieval manuscripts in his native Manipur.

Somi established and developed year-round film programming at New York's The Asia Society. He presented the first American exhibitions on Vietnamese cinema, Fifth Generation Chinese Cinema, Hong Kong popular films, and Iranian cinema, as well as introduced video installations and Asian American programming to this institution.

He is currently producing of a feature-length documentary film on baseball in Manipur, currently being shot by director Mirra Bank on this game as it is played in this state of India in the Southeastern Himalaya. His film, World Trade Center (2002) was screened at the Margaret Mead Film Festival.

Somi's work in the intersection of media and performance includes collaboration on A Page Out of Order 3 on Macedonia and Manipur, the next stage of choreographer Yoshiko Chuma’s series that will be presented at Japan Society in New York in May 2008. In May 2007, he produced Songs of Love and Creation, a concert of ballads and shaman rituals from Manipurfor World Music Institute at Symphony Space in New York. It marked the US debut of the Laihui Ensemble. The troupe also performed at the Opening Ceremony of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in May 2007.

Somi has taught at New York University and Manhattan Marymount College; given talks at the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution; translated Manipuri literary works into English; and written for Artforum, Asian Culture (the Smithsonian), Wide Angle, Black Film Bulletin (London), The Drama Review and Persimmon. He has been a guest on National Public Radio, WPIX-TV, CUNY-TV, Conversations with Harold Channer on MNN, Doordarshan (India) and NETV (India).