Prashanth Kamalakanthan ❁

is an Indian-American filmmaker, born in Tirupati, India, and raised in North Carolina. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Film,” a Sony/Gotham Marcie Bloom Fellow in Film, and jurist for NYU’s Purple List, his features include Have a Nice Life (2021), distributed by The Film Desk, New Strains (2023), which won a Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and is distributed by MEMORY, now streaming on Apple TV and YouTube Movies; and Removal of the Eye (2025). His work has screened at Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, MOMI, VCFA, and at film festivals worldwide. Prashanth holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BA from Duke University, where he was named Filmmaker of the Year. He is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and previously worked at The New York Times Video Desk and as a documentarian at Mother Jones and The Nation. Currently, he’s based in Los Angeles, in postproduction on an upcoming university-set feature.

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