Shalini Kantayya

Filmmaker, Eco-Activist, TED Fellow

A Drop of Life: Inside the Mounting Water Crisis

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"Shalini Kantayya takes us on a journey through society's class system and the world of profit. In minutes, this film will change your life." - Conrad Bachmann, Palm Beach International Film Festival juror

Brooklyn-based filmmaker, educator, and eco-activist Shalini Kantayya uses film as a tool to educate, inspire, and empower audiences. Kantayya finished in the top 10 out of 12,000 filmmakers on Fox's On the Lot, a show by Steven Spielberg in search of Hollywood's next great director. Her futuristic sci-fi flick about the world water crisis, a Drop of Life, won Best Short at Palm Beach International, a Crystal Dior Nomination at Tokyo Short Shorts, and was used as a tool to organize for water rights in 40 villages across Africa--making a real-world impact in the life of thousands. Her feature screenplay, Dark Tide, inspired by the Detroit water shut-offs, is a finalist at the Mumbai Mantra | Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

A William D. Fulbright Scholar, she won Best Documentary at the Asian American Film Festival for her film Manthan. Kantayya has received recognition from the Sundance Documentary Program, the Jerome Hill Centennial, IFP, New York Women in Film and Television, and Media Action Network for Asian Americans. A Sundance Fellow and a TED Fellow, Shalini has lectured at respected colleges including Harvard, Yale, Wesleyan, Northeastern and USC. Her work focuses on human rights at the intersection of water, food, and energy.

The mission of Kantayya's production company, 7th Empire Media, is to create a culture of human rights and a sustainable planet through wildly imaginative media that makes a real social impact. Her clients include the ACLU, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, History Channel, and Link TV. She was nominated for the Reebok Human Rights Award and received a Senior Performing Arts Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Kantayya is currently working on the feature documentary Solarize This. In a city where oil spills, air quality red-alerts, and poverty are commonplace, Solarize This asks the hard questions of how a clean energy economy may actually be built, through the stories of unemployed American workers seeking to retool at a solar power jobs training program in Richmond, California. The film was nominated by the Sundance Documentary Program for a Hilton Worldwide Sustainability Award, and anticipates release in 2013.

Shalini Kantayya Speech Topics

A Drop of Life: Inside the Mounting Water Crisis

Having come of age between Brooklyn and Bombay, Kantayya first became passionate about water rights while filming at the Kumbha Mela, a religious festival that happens at the confluence of three sacred rivers. She found the statistics alarming: two-thirds of the world's people will not have adequate access to clean drinking water by the year 2027. And there are no borders to this crisis. As demand rapidly exceeds supply, every species on the planet is in danger. Your access is at risk. The question is what will you do about it? In this gripping film screening and interactive talk, Shalini Kantayya fuses personal and political to explore the mounting worldwide water crisis, helping audiences to see water as a basic human right and inspiring them to make change.

An Evening with Filmmaker and Eco-Activist Shalini Kantayya

Shalini Kantayya was the only woman to finish in the top 10 out of 12,000 filmmakers in On the Lot, the Steven Spielberg show in search of Hollywood's next great director. Having come of age between Brooklyn and Bombay, Kantayya draws from her experience straddling cultures to talk about the courage to follow a dream. What is it like trying to break through as a woman film director, when women made up only 5% of Hollywood directors in 2011? Fusing the personal and the political, Kantayya discusses her relationship with her immigrant mother, the struggle to be an artist, and the circuitous path to success. In this entertaining and interactive presentation, Kantayya uses clips from her award-winning films to address why more films written and directed by women would transform culture on a mass scale.

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SUSAN CAIN at TED 2012

"When it comes to creativity and to leadership," Susan Cain said at TED 2012, "we need introverts doing what they do best." Her talk received a standing ovation. Cain's instant bestseller, Quiet, is a manifesto for the one-third to one-half of the population who are introverts—and who have been told, all their life, that their natural personality is flawed, that behaving like an extrovert is the only path to success. Most of our institutions, from schools to workplaces, are heavily biased toward extroverts. A self-identified introvert, Cain is working to change this and to radically transform the way we develop leaders, manage teams, make smart hires, and stimulate innovation.