sonali gulati

Sonali Gulati is an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Photography & Film.
She has an MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and a BA in Critical Social Thought from
Mount Holyoke College. Ms. Gulati's areas of specialization are film production and experimental filmmaking.
Before moving to Richmond, VA, she taught film production, film analysis, and international cinema
at Temple University. Ms. Gulati has made several short films that have screened at over two hundred
film festivals worldwide including Canada, United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. She has won awards
and grants from foundations such as the Third Wave Foundation and the World Studio Foundation.

artist statement

As a South Asian woman living in the United States, I have found myself keenly
interested in the politics of “representation” in mass media. I find myself drawn to
the kind of self, subject, and subjectivity portrayed in film. These are issues that
I have grappled with and continue to explore in my own creative work.

I am most interested in making films that create a stronger presence for diverse,
under-represented, and silenced voices. My work fuses art and politics from a place
of passion for activism and determination towards social change. I often ask myself:
Why this film? Or more importantly: Why am I making this film? As a result, my work is
driven by deeply personal motivations that strive to strengthen the connection between
my self and my work as a filmmaker.

As for content, I am particularly interested in working on issues of identity, in exploring
not just neatly defined categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality but more the
intersections, overlaps, and spaces in between these categories. This approach
translates itself into decisions in formal aesthetic choices too.

I find myself questioning, pushing, and crossing boundaries of genre (as a form) by
mixing traditional “documentary” with “fictional narratives” or even making the “fictional”
aspect of “documentary” more transparent. More recently, I have been toying with a
layered approach of telling and re-telling “a story” from multiple points-of-views aiming to
stretch “representations” into “re-presentations”. Ultimately, my goal is to not only find
innovative ways of storytelling, but also to create films as organizing tools, in the hope of
making this a safe, sustainable, and just world.

Sonali Gulati
VCU School of the Arts
Department of Photography & Film
P.O.Box 843088
Richmond, VA-23284-3088

tel. 804.828.4775
fax 804.828.6469
email: sonalifilm@yahoo.com

© sonali gulati

· Sonali Gulati · VCU School of the Arts · Department of Photography & Film·
· P.O.Box 843088 · Richmond, VA-23284-3088· USA·sonalifilm@yahoo.com·

website design by vanessa fassié