Ananya is an award-winning community-engaged creator who was born in India, and moved to Canada when she was ten years old. For seven years, she was the Executive Director at the Regent Park Film Festival (RPFF), Toronto’s longest running free community film festival. At RPFF, Ananya also founded and directed the Lieutenant General Award-winning and Governor General Award finalist (Honourable Mention) project, Home Made Visible (www.homemadevisible.ca), where she worked to preserve old home movies for BIPOC families across Canada.

Driven by her experience programming for a community-based film festival and consuming media alongside her own kids, Ananya is motivated to cultivate a greater, and more complex, diversity both in front of and behind the screen in the Film and TV industry.

As a filmmaker, her short experimental films and documentaries have screened locally and internationally, including the Toronto Urban Film Festival, Berlinale, the Images Festival, for UNICEF, and Pleasure Dome, and have garnered recognition such as Best Film.

For information visit: www.ananyaohri.com

As a recipient of CBC/Radio-Canada and Canada Council for the Arts Creation Accelerator funding, Ananya is currently producing and writing a kids’ animated adventure mystery series headed to CBC Kids, created with collaborator Fiona Raye Clarke.