Nayani Thiyagarajah

Nayani Thiyagarajah is a director, producer, and writer, dedicated to stories for the screen. She obtained her Bachelor of Journalism (Broadcasting) from Ryerson University and her M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from York University, with a focus on cinema/cultural production, diaspora, and gender and feminist studies. Her first feature documentary "Shadeism: Digging Deeper" (2015) had its World Premiere at the 2015 Zanzibar International Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize. Nayani is an alumni of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Workshop for Diverse Creators, the HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival's Doc Accelerator Program, and the Remix Project. She is a Co-Founder/Director at (RE)FRAME, an organization working to cultivate spaces for (un)learning through film and digital content, as well as the Society of DirectHERS and ProduceHERS, a women-led, women-focused organization focused on supporting women-identified storyteller and leaders in the world of film and television. A daughter of the Tamil diaspora, Nayani calls Toronto home. Above all, she believes in love.