Aarti Shrivastava

Aarti Shrivastava is an award-winning Indian documentary filmmaker and Asia 21 IPRYLI Fellow based in Mumbai. . After graduating from Wilson College, Mumbai, she began a career as a news reporter working with CNBC. She subsequently worked as a researcher on an Australian Documentary based on the 2008 Mumbai attacks, before directing her two award-winning documentaries, Land of Widows and White Knight, which were well received in the international festival circuit including Official Nomination in 7th Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival, Doha, 2011. In 2013, she directed her third documentary Foresting Life which won the National Award. This documentary focuses on the life of Jadav Payeng who singlehandedly planted trees over the last 35 years and transformed a 1400-acre sandbar into a self-sustaining forest ecosystem. She has been a jury member on various film festivals including the International Film Festival of India (Goa), Cebu International Documentary Film Festival, IDPA Awards for excellence, Jaipur, International Film Festival to name a few, is currently engaged in producing and directing a multi-year feature-length documentary project on Water crisis in India. Besides managing the Humanity Watchdog Foundation, for which she had the idea while she was studying social entrepreneurship at Stanford University, she also manages production on commercial Bollywood film projects like Kick, My Name Is Khan, and reality show Sur Kshetra