About Us
“As documentary filmmakers, teachers and academics, we have been shaped and enriched through our collaborations with each other and with our students, subjects and colleagues. Since 1985, we have jointly produced documentaries, researched, written, taught and learnt, brought up a daughter, done cooking, gardening, trekking and many other enjoyable activities. Our time spent in the field with our subjects as researchers and filmmakers has opened us up to the amazing ways in which local ways of seeing and being can offer us new insights into our being and our place (or lack of it) in the world. Our students constantly challenge us with their fresh approaches to practice and articulation. The warm zone of support and dialogue within the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, created through our interactions with our colleagues has given us the space to question, critique, dream and hope. We retired from TISS in 2020 and continue to write, make films, mentor and teach, and watch the grass grow, among other things. ”
A Brief Bio
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar are retired Professors, School of Media and Cultural Studies (www. smcs.tiss.edu), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. They superannuated in 2020, after a stint of nearly four decades. In recognition of their contribution to education, the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad conferred the Prof. Satish Bahadur Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contribution in Film Education on Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar, at the 6th Alpavirama — International Youth Film Festival, November 2022.
Monteiro has an M.A. in Economics (Pune University) and a Ph.D. in Sociology (Goa University/CSDS, Delhi). Jayasankar has an M.A. in German Studies (Mumbai University) and a Ph.D. in Humanities and Social Sciences (IIT-Bombay).
Both of them are involved in media production, teaching and research. They have played a key role in setting up the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS and the MA programme in Media and Cultural Studies. They teach courses in documentary and video production as well as theoretical approaches to image making practices. They have done pioneering and innovative work in critical media education with various groups including government officials, activists, school and college students, parents and teachers. They have also supervised several MA, M.Phil. and Ph.D. dissertations.
Their documentary films, which have been screened across the world, have won 33 national and international awards. A presiding thematic of much of their work has been a problematising of notions of self and the other, of normality and deviance, of the local and the global, through the exploration of diverse narratives and rituals. These range from the stories and paintings of indigenous peoples to the poetry of prison inmates. Some of their recent awards include the Basil Wright Prize 2013 for So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There) and Jury’s commendation in the Intangible Culture category 2019 for A Delicate Weave at the Royal Anthropological Institute Festival, UK. Retrospectives of their work include Vibgyor Film Festival, Kerala, 2006; Bangalore Film Society, 2010; Madurai International Film Festival, 2012 Parramasala Sydney, 2013, Chennai 2017, Trichur International Film Festival 2018 and India International Centre, New Delhi 2018. An adaptation of their film Saacha (The Loom) was a part of the art exhibition ‘Project Space: Word. Sound. Power.’ at the Tate Modern, London, in 2013, and at Walking Through the Soul City — Sudhir Patwardhan: A Retrospective, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, between Nov. 30, 2019 and Feb. 12, 2020. Monteiro and Jayasankar were invited artists at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, where Saacha (The Loom) was showcased as an installation, between Dec 12, 2018 and March 29, 2019.
They have served as jury and as festival consultants and directors to several film festivals in India and overseas. They have mentored over 100 student and fellowship documentary film projects as commissioning editors, many of which have been screened at film festivals, and have won awards. They have to their credit a series of thematic web archives on the city of Mumbai, under the rubric of DiverCity, based on their student work, their own films, and crowd-sourced resources.
They research and write in the broad areas of censorship, documentary film and media and cultural studies and have contributed to scholarly journals and edited volumes. Their most recent publications are A Fly in the Curry — Independent Documentary Film in India, Sage, 2016, which has won a Special Mention for the best book on cinema in the National Film Awards, 2016, DigiNaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-Capitalist India, Anjali Monteiro, K.P. Jayasankar, Amit S. Rai (Eds.), Orient Black Swan, 2020, and Many Voices, Many Worlds: Critical Perspectives on Community Media in India, Faiz Ullah, Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar (Eds.), 2021, Sage.
Monteiro and Jayasankar are both recipients of the Howard Thomas Memorial Fellowship in Media Studies, and have been attached to Goldsmith’s College, London and the University of Western Sydney. Monteiro was a Fulbright visiting lecturer in 2006-07 at the University of California, Berkeley. They were both attached to the University of Lund, Sweden as Erasmus Mundus Scholars in 2013. In mid 2013, they were at the University of Technology, Sydney as visiting professor/fellow. They have served as visiting faculty at several leading media and design institutions and lectured at universities in the USA, Australia, Europe, and in Asian countries.
They have both been actively involved in movements against censorship including Vikalp, which is collective of documentary filmmakers campaigning for freedom of expression and are also associated with boards of various universities, and media and voluntary organisations.