Nilita Vachani

Nilita Vachani is a documentary filmmaker and editor, and a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She produced, directed, and edited the critically acclaimed films "Eyes of Stone", "Diamonds in a Vegetable Market", and "When Mother Comes Home for Christmas". Her awards include the Grand Prize at the Festival dei Popoli; the Basil Wright Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute; the Golden Conch, Bombay International Film Festival; the Prix Alcan du Jury at the Montreal International Film Festival for Women; the Uppsala Filmkaja in Sweden; Best feature-length television documentary, Asian Film Academy, London; the Grand Prize at the Torino International Film Festival for Women; National Award for best film on Social Issues, India. 

She has worked as an editor on several documentaries and as an assistant director and script supervisor to Mira Nair.

Vachani’s novel "Homespun" (Other Press) won Foreword’s Choice Fiction Award in 2008. Her long-form investigative writing on domestic work and white-collar crime, published in The Nation and in Caravan won the Asia Media Foundation’s inaugural prize for Investigative Journalism in 2016. Her book "The Other America in Wiseman’s Cinema" is forthcoming in 2027.