Selected work

Films, consulting projects, language documentation work, and open-source initiatives, grouped by focus area. Reach out to discuss advisory and consulting, impact filmmaking, or documentary research.

Documentary filmmaking

2023
Docu-fiction 14 min Interledger Foundation

Bringing Down a Mountain

Role: Director & producer

Bringing Down a Mountain dissects the intersecting themes of access, abolition and caste through the experiences of residents of a rural village and that of a hyper-urban city. The film follows the village residents’ dreams—of mobile data, digital payment and relief from menial work. What happens when the landfill is full, and dreams want to break free? Made through the Future|Money grant, Bringing Down a Mountain is a speculative film centred around financial inclusion with a push and pull between caste abolition and Unified Payment Interface, a mobile digital payment system in India. It was premiered in November 2023 at the Interledger Summit 2023 in Costa Rica. Covered by Blackmagic Design. DVD archived at the US Library of Congress.

Project site ↗
2022
Documentary 35 min Language documentation

Nani Ma

Role: Director & producer

The first-ever documentary in the Baleswari dialect of Odia. A 95-year-old grandma, Musamoni Panigrahi, in a tiny eastern Indian town battles dementia, endangering the folklore and songs she remembers. None ever recorded those words that carry the agony of the 1866 Famine of Orissa for generations. Her last days are counted. She never got to sit on a plane. Will her words travel any far? Nani Ma was selected for the Mozilla Festival 2023 (International Premiere), Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions (UK), and the Eighth International Folklore Film Festival 2025, and was premiered at Bakul Foundation, Bhubaneswar (India).

Project site ↗ Watch ↗
2022
Documentary 35 min Archiving

The Volunteer Archivists

Role: Director & producer

Srujanika was founded as a volunteer-led collective by scientist couple Nikhil Mohan Pattnaik and Puspashree Pattnaik in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India, in 1983. Since 2006, its workforce of only a handful of volunteers has managed to collect, process, and archive 10,000 volumes of books, magazines, and other periodicals and dictionaries published in the Odia language since the early 1800s. These publications are hosted on their portal—Odia Bibhaba. A large portion of the books they have archived was beyond conservation and, in most cases, did not have anyone to conserve them. But what really led to this massive project? This Open Culture documentary film accounts for the ups and downs of the movements Srujanika led and their constant struggle to document Odisha’s utterly neglected printing history. International premiere at Wikimania, Singapore; screened with a discussion at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal, in January 2023.

Project site ↗ Watch ↗
2021
Documentary 69 min Digital rights Yoti Fellowship

MarginalizedAadhaar

Role: Director, researcher & producer  |  Award: Digital Identity Fellowship (Yoti, 2019)

An outcome of extensive filming across India as part of the 2019 Yoti Digital Identity Fellowship. The film dissects how India's national biometric ID system, Aadhaar, adopted by over a billion people, excluded its most marginalized populations, and how that could have been prevented. Premiered at re:publica 2021, Berlin; used in University of Michigan and Sciences Po Paris academic courses. Discussed at Response-ability Tech 2021 and ICLDC, University of Hawaiʻi.

Watch ↗
2019
Documentary 25 min National Geographic Best Screenplay, IFEFA 2022

Gyani Maiya

Role: Director & producer  |  Grant: National Geographic Society

The Kusunda people were once a semi-nomadic hunter and gatherer community that settled in villages around the mid-western Nepalese district of Dang. They have long lost their native language Mihaq (Kusunda), to acculturation and other barriers to active use. The community also lost its 83-year-old elder Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda in 2020, the most and the only known fluent Kusunda speaker then. Filmed in Kulmor in the Dang District in 2018, this documentary is a memoir of Sen-Kusunda in her own words and a biography of her people who were forced to leave their language and cultural identity. Kusunda is being revived by Kamala Sen Khatri, Sen-Kusunda’s younger sister, and Uday Raj Aaley, a local researcher who is the key collaborator for this film. Co-written with Uday Raj Aaley and Sanjib Chaudhary, as part of OpenSpeaks. Gyani Maiya was awarded Best Screenplay at the International Film & Entertainment Festival Australia (IFEFA) 2022, and was selected for the 6th International Folklore Film Festival 2023, Thrissur (India), Khamrubu International Short Film Festival 2023, Kamrup (India), Nepal America International Film Festival 2023, International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation at University of Hawaiʻi (US), Lanham (US), Balkan Can Kino, Athens (Greece), Bozok Film Festivali, Yozgat (Turkey), Festival RNAB, Sao Paulo, and Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions, Buckinghamshire (UK).

Project site ↗ Watch on Vimeo ↗
2019
Documentary 40 min National Geographic

Mage Porob

Role: Director & producer  |  Grant: National Geographic Society

Mining has destroyed the indigenous Ho land while bringing grave disrespect to the Ho deities. The locals in an eastern Indian village struggle to put aside their heartache. Mainstream society would mock them when speaking their own language. As the annual winter harvest festival—Mage Porob—approaches, the community navigates their pain and loss while preparing for the celebration. But how does a mother forget the pain of mother nature and prepare the fresh Rasi drink to mark the festival? How will the paralyzed former maestro orchestrate for the nervous musicians? Will the joy of Mage Porob be enough to heal the wounds of the past? Made in collaboration with Veer Birsa Munda Ho Students Union Odisha (Birbasa).

Project site ↗ Watch ↗
2019
Documentary 35 min National Geographic Endangered language

Remosam

Role: Director & producer  |  Grant: National Geographic Society

Far up on the Bonda hills, the Bondak people are met with dysfunctional governance that fails to feed or keep their language alive. This film takes place in the Mudulipada village of the Malkangiri administrative district in Odisha, India. Remosam has been identified as a severely-endangered language by UNESCO. Made in collaboration with the upper Bonda community, lexicographer Gobardhan Panda, and the Council of Analytical Tribal Studies. Premiered at the 2018 Koraput Literary Festival.

Project site ↗

Language documentation & open-source

2026
Archiving Language documentation Network

Archiving the Present

Role: Organiser, co-editor & co-author (manual)

Archiving the Present is an emerging network of language and memory keepers, organised by OpenSpeaks, working together on community-led documentation and archiving. It grew out of the OpenSpeaks Community Language Documentation and Archiving workshop series, and launched in person as a workshop by the same name, alongside WikiConference India, Kochi, on 3 September 2026. The manual, Archiving the Present: A Community Guide to Archiving Languages, Memories & Knowledges, grew out of a three-month online workshop series with nearly 20 trainers from seven countries. It is published in print, as an e-book, and as a certificate course on WikiLearn. The cover art is by Siddhesh Gautam.

Network site ↗ E-book (PDF) ↗ WikiLearn course ↗
2017–
Language documentation Open source National Geographic Explorer

OpenSpeaks

Role: Founder & lead  |  Awards: NatGeo Explorer 2017, MJ Bear Fellowship 2017, Creative Commons mini-grant, Mozilla Open Leaders (Round 4 project, 2017; Round 5 expert, 2018), Grant for the Web 2021

OpenSpeaks is an audiovisual documentation toolkit for low-resource languages, used in ten-plus documentaries and to record ten-plus languages. Its open-source tools are offline-first and made for language archivists: Subtitler is for creating and translating audio/video subtitles, Tome is for creating metadata and agreements, Bento is for managing files, and the OpenSpeaks Media Dashboard is for measuring the impact of image, audio and video contributions to Wikimedia Commons. OpenSpeaks Archives has enhanced over 1,000 Wikipedia and Wikimedia pages in 127+ languages, and its recordings are archived at the Library of Congress (over 71,000 audio files) and the Language Archive Cologne (Kusunda and Sora).

OpenSpeaks Tools ↗ OpenSpeaks Archives ↗ Toolkit ↗
2023
Language technology Speech corpus Public domain

Odia Language Speech Corpus — 72,000 recordings

Role: Creator & lead researcher

The largest openly licensed speech corpus in Odia, and the largest South Asian-language speech dataset under a universal Public Domain (CC0) release. 72,000 recordings created in 2023. They support AI/ML research, voice assistants, and speech technology for a language spoken by over 40 million people.

2016
Language technology Typography Indigenous language

Project Ol Chiki

Role: Founder & coordinator

Founded and coordinated creation of input tools and the Guru Gomke font family for India's indigenous Santali language, written in the Ol Chiki script. Made digital tools for a writing system used by over seven million people.

Consulting & strategic work

2022–
Strategy Social entrepreneurship

Law for All Director — Ashoka

Role: Director  |  Organization: Ashoka

Activated and supported social entrepreneurs with continental impact. Earlier, built an ecosystem of 200 justice-focused social entrepreneurs across South Asia.

2021
Research Open knowledge Grant for the Web

Web Content Monetization in Ho and Santali Languages

Role: Lead researcher  |  Funder: Grant for the Web (OpenSpeaks)

An investigation into whether web content monetization works for speakers of Ho and Santali, two indigenous languages of India with millions of speakers but minimal digital presence.

Teaching engagements

  • “Oral Knowledge Is Human Knowledge”, Jadavpur University, 2026
  • “Oral History Is Knowledge”, TU Darmstadt, 2026
  • Linguistic diversity MOOC, Universitat de Barcelona
  • Aadhaar, Sciences Po
  • Language documentation activism, IIT Madras and Srishti
  • Wikipedia in education, Christ University