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.
Role: Director & producer
A speculative docu-fiction exploring how a rural Indian village confronts caste abolition, extractivism, and ableism in tech innovation. The film intersects access, bahujan economic power, and digital payments in a hyper-urban vs. rural setting. Made through the Interledger Foundation's Future|Money grant; premiered November 2023 in Costa Rica. Covered by Blackmagic Design. DVD archived at the US Library of Congress.
Role: Director & producer
The first-ever documentary in the Baleswari dialect of Odia. As 95-year-old Musamoni Panigrahi battles memory loss, her never-before-recorded songs and stories face extinction. An intimate portrait of a grandmother and a vanishing oral tradition. Selected at the Eighth International Folklore Film Festival 2025.
Role: Director & producer
A volunteer archivist group in India and its 15-year struggle to digitally preserve the rarest and earliest Odia-language historical publications, some dating to the early 1800s. International premiere at Wikimania, Singapore.
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.
Role: Director & producer | Grant: National Geographic Society
Adults in a Nepali indigenous community have long forgotten their language. How does the eldest of two last living speakers keep a near-extinct language alive? Made in collaboration with Nepalese journalist Sanjib Chaudhary, researcher Uday Raj Aaley, and the late Gyani Maiya Sen-Kusunda — the last speaker of Kusunda — as part of OpenSpeaks. Nine international wins: Best Screenplay (IFEFA 2022, Australia), 6th International Folklore Film Festival 2023, Nepal America International Film Festival 2023, ICLDC University of Hawaiʻi, Balkan Can Kino Athens, Bozok Film Festivali Turkey, Festival RNAB São Paulo, and more.
Role: Director & producer | Grant: National Geographic Society
The eponymous harvest festival of the Ho people, an indigenous tribe of eastern India — where everyone must gather to celebrate and receive blessings of the forest and mountain deities. Made in collaboration with Veer Birsa Munda Ho Students Union Odisha (Birbasa).
Role: Director & producer | Grant: National Geographic Society
A linguistic and cultural documentation of the endangered Bonda language and people of Bonda Hills, Odisha — where dysfunctional governance fails to feed or keep their language alive. 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.
Role: Founder & lead | Awards: NatGeo Explorer 2017, MJ Bear Fellowship 2017, Creative Commons mini-grant, Mozilla Open Leadership 2021, Grant for the Web 2021
A lab and audiovisual toolkit for digital language activists to document low- and medium-resourced languages. OpenSpeaks has been used in ten-plus documentaries and to record ten-plus languages. The framework applies openness, community collaboration, and ethics to language documentation fieldwork.
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 — enabling AI/ML research, voice assistants, and speech technology for a language spoken by over 40 million people.
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.
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.
Role: Director & producer | Partners: Centre for Internet and Society, Christ University
Two bilingual (Hindi and Kannada) open educational web series on editing Wikipedia, created for educators and student communities across India.
Role: Lead researcher | Funder: Grant for the Web (OpenSpeaks)
An investigation into how web content monetization works — or doesn't — for speakers of Ho and Santali, two indigenous languages of India with millions of speakers but minimal digital presence.