Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a filmmaker and professor born in Tirupati, India and raised in North Carolina. He has a background in music, documentary and photography, and has been named Filmmaker of the Year at Duke University, a Gotham Marcie Bloom Fellow in Film, and recently as one of the “25 New Faces of Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. Prashanth teaches cinema at Virginia Commonwealth University, and previously at Brown University and NYU’s Tisch Graduate Film. He has directed and edited short documentaries for The New York Times, Mother Jones, The Nation, and Tribeca Film Institute, as well as several award-winning narrative short films that have played festivals worldwide. His debut feature, Have a Nice Life (2021), was followed by New Strains (2023), which won the Tiger Special Jury Award at IFFR.