Sanjna Selva

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