Parag Amladi is a film scholar and educator and has taught film studies and film production first in Bombay at the Xavier Institute of Communication and subsequently at campuses of the City University of New York. He is a graduate of the Cinema Studies Dept at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He has published scholarly and journalistic articles on the new Indian cinema as well as on the popular cinema. He has also worked in film and TV production and is currently developing a feature film project.

Ashish Avikunthak is a filmmaker from India making films for the more than fifteen years. He is an Assistant Professor in Film Media at the University of Rhode Island and has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University. His films have been shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. His first feature film Nirakar Chayya (Shadows Formless) was premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival and won the Best Director and the Best Actress award at NYIFF 2008.

Tejaswini Ganti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and its Program in Culture & Media at New York University.  A visual anthropologist specializing in South Asia, her research interests include Indian cinema, anthropology of media, production cultures, visual culture, cultural policy, nationalism, neoliberalism, capitalism, ideologies of development and theories of globalization.  She has been conducting ethnographic research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996 and is the author of Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition forthcoming) Her most recent book Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke 2012), examines the social and institutional transformations of the Hindi film industry from 1994-2010.  She has also written about the politics of commemorative rituals around cinema in Bombay, Hindi filmmakers’ practices of remaking Hollywood films, and the Hindi film industry’s complex relationship to censorship.  Additionally, she has produced the documentary, Gimme Somethin’ to Dance to! (1995) which explores the significance of bhangra music for South Asians in the U.S.
Education: BA 1991, Northwestern University; MA 1994, University of Pennsylvania; PhD 2000, New York University.

Udayan Gupta is the co-founder of Books Beyond Boundaries, a collaborative publishing company, and a consultant to small entrepreneurial businesses and asset managers.
He is a former senior special writer at The Wall Street Journal, is the author of several books, including Done Deals, The First Venture Capitalist and Mind Into Matter.  Mr. Gupta’s writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times as well as Advertising Age, Alpha, American Film, Barron’s, Black Enterprise, Chronicle of Higher Education, Cineaste, Electronic Media, Fortune, Hispanic Business, Information Week, Institutional Investor, Jump Cut, Madison Avenue, Red Herring, and Seven Days. He is also a publisher and producer of interactive multi-media projects.

Myrna Moncayo-Iyengar currently works as Director of Corporate Strategy for Tribeca Enterprises, the parent company of the Tribeca Film Festival, Tribeca Film and Tribeca Flashpoint. Prior to Tribeca, Myrna led the casting process for Ramin Bahrani's film Chop Shop, which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards and one Gotham Award, including Breakthrough Actor. She also helped coordinate Oscar-campaign events for "Children of Men" and "Pan's Labyrinth" while at Alfonso Cuarón's Esperanto Filmoj, and managed film acquisitions for Emerging Pictures. Prior to being bitten by the film bug in 2005, she worked in various management positions for 10 years in various firms including Citibank, Deloitte & Touche and KPMG.

Claus Mueller pursued undergraduate and graduate studies in Germany, France, and the United States and teaches media research at CUNY. He has authored books and articles, focusing most recently integration and film tourism issues, as well as producing DOCUMENTARIES and presented related papers in New Delhi, Busan and other venues. As a recipient of numerous awards, including Fulbrights, he has arranged seminars and Congressional briefings and carried out research overseas with the next project scheduled for Cambodia. Apart from curating at specialized film festivals he has served as a judge for film festivals and for the national and international Emmys. He is the New York Correspondent for the Paris based M21Editions, but also writes for other electronic and print publications. He has been serving on the board of non-profit media organizations such as the International Film Exchange and the New York Film and Video Council and has been elected to the American Council on Germany and the International Council of the National Television Academy. He is listed in Marquis’ Who’s Who in America.

Muriel (Mike) Peters film and television productions and credits include: LISTENING TO VOLCANOES, a Documentary shot in Indonesia for PBS and BBC, with Madhur Jaffrey as presenter; INNER SPACE TO OUTER SPACE, a trilogy of films on Indonesia; ASIA STAGE CENTER, a television series bringing together Asian and Western performing artists; THE REVENGE OF TWO SONS, a video on the Court Dance of Okinawa; MANIFESTATIONS OF SHIVA, a Documentary feature for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Asia Society and PBS; WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO WHEN YOU GROW OLD? With DCA Productions; THE EYE OF THE STORM, a Documentary for ABC News, winner of a Peabody and many other awards; THE DAY BEFORE TOMORROW, for Newsweek Magazine; THE GURU, a Merchant Ivory feature shot in India for 20th Century Fox, starring Michael York and Utpal Dutt; and AFRICA, a four-hour Documentary for ABC. She is currently one of the producers of the Documentary film, A WAY HOME, about the U.S.-Manipur baseball project; and is developing THE DIPLOMAT’S WIFE, a feature set in India in 1963.
Ms. Peters was Director of the Film and Broadcasting Department of the Asia Society in New York from 1977-82, during which time she was Director of FILM INDIA (a major retrospective of films from India, jointly with MOMA), of FILMS FROM KOREA and of CINEMA INDONESIA. She was also Executive in charge of Film and Broadcasting for the Indo-US Subcommission on Education and Culture from 1976-83.
She is a longtime member of New York Women in Film, served as a Board Director and continues to serve on the Advisory Board. She was for some years the Chairman of the Board of Women in Film and Television International. She is a member of IFP.
Ms. Peters received a B.A. in philosophy from Harvard University, and a B. Litt in Oriental Art from Oxford University. Her dissertation was on the Elephanta caves of India, where she also lived for many years. She continues to maintain close ties with India. She has traveled widely in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Caribbean, North America.

Zenobia Shroff - Zenobia Shroff has been a actress, writer and teaching artist for twenty five years. She began her professional career at age sixteen as a commercial print model. After seven successful years as a model she switched gears to acting. She got her acting start in Mumbai under the mentorship of the legendary Pearl Padamsee. With Padamsee’s encouragement, she came to study acting at New York’s Circle in the Square theatre school. Soon after, she honed her craft at the off- Broadway theatre Castillo, where she played several and diverse roles such as Nora in Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s house’ to German avant-gardist Heiner Muller. She also performed in Mario Frattis “Erotic adventures in Venice” at the famed La Mama and Milan Kunderas “Jacques and his master”.

Nilita Vachani was born in New Delhi and now lives in New York. She is an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker and writer. Her film Eyes of Stone won the Golden Conch at BIFF (1992) and the Rajat Kamal for the Best Film on Social Issues the same year; the Prix Alcan du Jury at the Montreal International Festival of Films by Women (1990), the Uppsala FilmKaja at the Uppsala International Film Festival (1991), the Basil Wright Prize at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, Manchester (1992), special mention Prix des Bibliotheque, Cinema du Reel (1990) and a nomination for the Documentary award at Hawaii, 1992. Her film Diamonds in a Vegetable Market won BBC the best Feature Documentary award from the Asian Film Academy in 1994. ‘When Mother Comes Home for Christmas won the Best Film at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence (1996) and Best Documentary at the International Women’s film festival in Torino (1997). Her films have been in the official selections at Berlin, Rotterdam, London, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Yamagata, amongst a host of others, and have been broadcast on BBC, La Sept, Arte, ORF, SBS, ZDF. ERT, RAI and Doordarshan. Apart from being extensively reviewed in the media, her work has been written about in Global Woman (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003), Left in the Dark (Stuart Klawans, 2002) and Moving People Moving Images (Brown et al,2010).
Nilita has worked as an Editor on several documentary features and as Assistant Director on Mira Nair’s ‘Salaam Bombay’ and Script Supervisor on ‘Mississippi Masala’.
Her debut novel HomeSpun won Foreword’s Choice Fiction Award in 2008. Nilita has recently adapted Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide for the screen. Her first screenplay The Banyan won the French government’s CNC-Fonds-Sud prize for an emerging filmmaker from the south.
She is Associate faculty at Tisch School for the Arts, New York University.