Empowering Through Technology: Film and Education for Social Upliftment

Shabani Hassanwalia is a writer by background and a filmmaker by profession, creating non-fiction content in various media since the year 2000. Her work work engages with changing socio-political realities, volatile subcultures and intimate personal histories in an India-in-transition. As a co-founder of Hit and Run Films, she helped build a company that, over a decade, produced, directed and edited feature-length documentary works that travelled to national and international festivals, and aired on various channels. She also does extensive advocacy work using documentary, ethnography, observational and long-format interview methods, to create feature, video, photography and text pieces in various styles and genres. Her feature documentaries include Being Bhaijaan (2014), Gali (2017) and Out of Thin Air (2009). She is an INLAKS Fellow, and worked at The Sundance Institute, Los Angeles and the Documentary Filmmakers Group, London, as part of the fellowship. She is currently working as an editor-in-chief of The Third Eye, a feminist think tank on gender, sexuality, technology and education, set up by the Nirantar Trust.

Nameeta Premkumar graduated from St. Xaviers College with an Economics Honours degree and went on to do her Post graduation in Social Communications Media in Sophia College to study Film, Radio and Television. She further studied Film in New York and made three films which were showcased in the Harvard faculty club. Over the past two decades, she has worked in roles as an Independent Producer and Director with organisations; and has collaborated with esteemed artists and companies to create new projects and execute them in India and internationally. Through her two-decade-long career she has worked on series and content across various platforms like Netflix, Dutch Television, The BBC, TV Today and so on. She has made commercials for Corporate companies, collaborated with world renowned musicians and artists and Produced acclaimed independent feature films. She was recently nominated for the Filmfare 2020 Awards, in the category of Best Director for a short film Kaash, and was awarded a certificate of excellence at the Dadasaheb Phalke Awards 2020. Her strength is to challenge stereotypes by pushing the envelope to create new ideas and execute them to foster meaningful collaborations and people management. She has always continued to work with children because they are the future and she believes that their foundation needs to be strengthened with wholesome, enriching experiences. She has worked with the most innovative children’s museum in the world, the Tropenmuseum, Netherlands where she learned about teaching and entertaining children through innovative methods. She was awarded and felicitated by Princess Maxima of Netherlands and the Dutch Consulate in recognition of the work executed in collaboration with the Tropenmuseum, Netherlands. She founded Filmbug, a charitable initiative to teach professional filmmaking to marginalized children across India to bring about social change. At Filmbug, the children learn how to think out of the box, create stories, storyboarding, write scripts, screenplays, shot breakdowns, pre-production and eventually shoot the film on location on their own. The Filmbug family has grown and mentored many children, given them employment and put them through education amongst other things.

Arshan Vakil is the Founder & CEO of Enguru - India's largest live English learning app. Enguru has over 40mn registered users and offers a combination of machine learning based free self paced learning and affordable live classes. The primary use case is to help young adults in India build enough English skills to improve their career prospects. Arshan completed a dual degree in Systems Engineering and Economics from Penn & Wharton and was included in Forbes Asia’s 30 under 30 publication in the consumer technology category in 2018.

Neera Nundy is the co-founder of Dasra, an India based strategic philanthropy foundation works with a field building approach to create systems change in India. Over the past 20 years, Dasra has actively shaped the development sector by building stronger institutions such as Magic Bus, Educate Girls and SNEHA, has worked with leading foundations including Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives, Tata Trust, Omidyar Network and Gates Foundation and works closely with government departments at a state and national level to put Impact First in the development agenda. Dasra's work involves creating collaborative funding platforms in the fields of Adolescent Girls, Urban Sanitation and Democracy and Governance. Reinforced through a research-backed approach and institution building for non-profits, Dasra focuses on prioritizing human lives at the centre of collaborative action. As co-founder, Neera leads eco-system building initiatives and facilitates key partnerships with global leaders like Harvard University, Stanford University and USAID to accelerate social impact. She has been instrumental in enabling capacity building for nonprofits through the launch of Dasra Social Impact Leadership Program with Harvard Business Publishing, a first-of-its-kind executive education program for social sector leaders in India and has supported the development of over 70 social sector research reports, driving USD 44 million in funding for hundreds of nonprofits. Neera Nundy has been recognized for her work through Dasra by several prestigious awards and recognition. She was selected by Forbes India Self Made Women in 2020 and received the "Agent of Social Change" Award at Vogue Women of The Year 2019. Neera was awarded for "Special Contributions by Woman" at the 15th Indo-American Corporate Excellence Awards by the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce. She is also a recipient of the Canadian Governor General's Medallion for her dedication to addressing India’s critical development challenges, and the Forbes Philanthropy Award in the Crossover Leaders category. She lives in Mumbai and is married to Dasra cofounder Deval Sanghavi with three boys Ayush, Laxman and Akbar.