Assistant Professor
Cinema Program
Prashanth Kamalakanthan is an Indian-American filmmaker, born in Tirupati, India, and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. Trained at Duke University and NYU, his work spans documentary and narrative forms, exploring the migrant and millennial experience in an increasingly fluid world, dealing with themes of digitality, alienation, and the absurd while drawing from a deep study of global storytelling forms, in particular the postcolonial cinema. A 2018-19 IFP-Marcie Bloom Fellow in Film, Prashanth previously taught at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Reelworks in Brooklyn, and at NYU Tisch Graduate Film; as well as having worked at The New York Times, Mother Jones, The Nation, and elsewhere. Prashanth’s approach to teaching is future-oriented, conceiving arts education with an emphasis on empowering students to begin the unending learning process of developing their own personal artistic and professional practices. His first feature film as a writer/director/editor, HAVE A NICE LIFE, is currently playing at festivals worldwide while he is based in New York, where he is developing his second feature alongside other upcoming projects.