About The Directors
Nandini Sikand (Co-Director) Born and raised in New Delhi, Nandini Sikand is a filmmaker, Odissi dancer and anthropologist. Sikand’s documentary and experimental films have screened and won awards at over a 100 domestic and international film festivals. Her work has aired on PBS and has been awarded grants from The Jerome Foundation, the Center for Asian American Media and she is two-time awardee of New York State Council on the Arts. Her films include, The Bhangra Wrap (1995), Don’t Fence Me In (1998), Amazonia (2001), In Whose Name? (2004), Soma Girls (2009) and Cranes of Hope (2011). She also produced the documentary Mahasweta Devi: Witness, Advocate, Writer (2001). In television, she has worked as a producer and director on projects for Channel Four: UK, Ovation: the Arts Network, HBO, Oxygen, and The History Channel. She served on the board of directors of Women Make Movies, a non-profit feminist media distribution organization from 1997-2006. She was on the Fulbright IIE National Selection committee for film and video for 2008-2011. Nandini is an Assistant Professor of an interdisciplinary film and media studies program at Lafayette College, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. She also choreographs and performs with her neoclassical Odissi dance company, Sakshi Productions.
Alexia Prichard (Co-Director) Alexia is an independent filmmaker, television producer, online media specialist, videographer and editor based in Boston. In TV production, she has worked as a writer, producer, videographer, and editor for Oxygen, Lifetime, Annenberg Media, Plum TV, and The Discovery Channel. Recently, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she produced a 6-hour 3D series on marine life, shipwrecks, and underwater caves for The Discovery Channel’s 24-hour 3D network, 3net. For three years she was Senior Video Producer/Editor for AOL for whom she created and produced an online series on sustainability, and, in 2008, covered the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, partnering with Nokia and Kyte.com to stream video live from a cell phone on the convention floors. In educational programming, Alexia developed and edited a reality-style TV series blending sports with science for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology she produced a short film on a freshman engineering class discussing colossal failures in engineering. Among her numerous editing credits, feature documentary work includes: Call Me Horacio, about the effects of Argentina’s Dirty War on one young man; The Baja Wave Document, about the destructive development along the Baja CA coast; Discovering: Shuktara, about a home for deaf and disabled boys and girls in Kolkata, India; and Soma Girls, which was awarded grants from the Center for Asian American Media, and the New York State Council on the Arts, and screened on PBS in 2012. Alexia’s second film, The Dirty Truth About Coal (2011), about the negative effects on public health of emissions from coal-fired power plants, was a 2009 and 2010 Finalist for the Roy W. Dean Film Grant, and is being used by The Sierra Club in their national anti-coal campaign.