Kiana Rawji

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT KIANA RAWJI

I am writer-director from Canada currently based in Brooklyn, NY. I recently graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College studying Film and History & Literature. As a Muslim woman and daughter of South Asian immigrants from Kenya, I am particularly interested in stories of diaspora and displacement, home and human resilience. Through both fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, I hope to close distances between people while celebrating the differences among them. My 2021 documentary, LONG DISTANCE, about migrant workers at an Albertan meat plant won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Alberta Short Film at the 2021 Calgary International Film Festival and screened at several other festivals across Canada and the US. My 2023 short documentary, MAMA OF MANYATTA—which screened at 2023 Pan African Film Festival, Essence Film Festival, and Zanzibar International Film Festival, with a Special Jury Mention— followed an extraordinary woman fighting HIV/AIDS and gender-based-violence in a slum in Kisumu, Kenya. And my 2023 undergraduate thesis film, INSIDE JOB, a fictional film revolving around an Indian housewife, her African domestic servants, and a jewelry theft in 1970s East Africa, was awarded with the Harvard Film Department’s Arnheim Prize for the most outstanding interdisciplinary undergraduate project, incorporating scholarly research with visual communication. It premiered at the 2023 Chicago South Asian Film Festival.