Empowering the World's Documentarians

Sanjna Selva

(she/her)

Producer, Eastern Standard Times

New York, New York US

Available for Full Time

Available for Freelance

Open To Virtual Coffee

About

Sanjna Selva (she/her) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in New York City. Her debut film Call Me Anytime, I’m Not Leaving the House, about two sisters separated by the war in Ukraine, was acquired by PBS for broadcast on POV Shorts—and was also the first film to receive two broadcasts since the start of the program’s five season run. Her work has screened at numerous festivals and spaces including DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, Woodstock Film Festival, and Indie Memphis Film Festival within the U.S., as well as at film festivals in France, Romania, the Netherlands, and Ukraine, where it has received best short documentary and audience awards. Sanjna began her career as an associate producer on the Sundance-supported feature documentary Silent Beauty which had its world premiere in 2022 at the Hot Docs Film Festival, its U.S. premiere at the BlackStar Film Festival, and won best documentary feature at Urbanworld Film Festival. Sanjna is a graduate of the M.S. program in Journalism with a specialization in Documentary Film at Columbia University, a 2020 Double Exposure Film Festival Fellow, and a 2019 Skidmore-MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute Resident. Her work has been featured in CBS New York, EST Media, Defense News, and the International Center of Photography. She is also a member of the South Asian Journalists Association, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and Film Fatales. Sanjna is presently working on her next documentary, Spa City Revolutionary, which investigates police and FBI surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists in small-town America—a town she lived in for five years. Contact: sanjna.s@columbia.edu

Featured Work

Call Me Anytime, I'm Not Leaving the House (2022)

Debut short film I directed, produced, shot, and edited acquired by PBS for POV Shorts Season 5.

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Silent Beauty (2022)

When director Jasmin Mara López sees a photo of her niece with her grandfather, she is flooded by painful memories of her own childhood sexual abuse at his hands—and the following 24 years of her silence. In this cinematically striking and poetic documentary, López bravely documents her story as a willful act to accept difficult truths while finding beauty in the process of healing. As she defies the cultural silence that pervades her family and confronts her abusive grandfather, a Baptist minister, a world of generational abuse unfolds before her eyes, and she quickly discovers she is not alone. AP, Silent Beauty directed by Jasmin Mara Lopez.

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2020 ICP Infinity Awards: Applied - Nadine Ijewere (2020)

Short film paying tribute to acclaimed Vogue photographer Nadine Ijewere on her groundbreaking work photographing people of color. Screened at the 2020 International Center of Photography Infinity Awards. Interviewer & Co-Producer

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Tallie Gabriel (2021)

Tallie Gabriel is a New York-based poet, musician, and writer of all sorts. With her trusty typewriter and fascination for human connection, she writes poetry for people on the fly in the hope of bringing a little cheer to someone’s day. Short profile I directed, shot, and edited as part of the Columbia Journalism School Documentary Program.

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