Sonali Gulati is an independent filmmaker, a feminist, a queer rights activist, and an educator. She teaches film at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts in the 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. Gulati grew up in New Delhi and has made several films that have screened at over five hundred film festivals worldwide. 

Her films have screened at venues such as the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and at film festivals such as the Margaret Mead Film Festival, the Black Maria Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, and BlackStar Film Festival. Gulati’s award-winning documentary film I Am was broadcasted on public television and cable TV in the U.S. and Portugal. Her documentary film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night, was broadcast on television in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Asia, and North Africa.  

Gulati is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received support for her work from the Creative Capital Foundation, Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), Third Wave Foundation, Tribeca All Access, and World Studio Foundation. She’s also won awards and recognition from the Robert Giard Memorial Fellowship, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts, and VCU School of the Arts Faculty Award of Excellence.

Gulati is passionate about social justice issues and her artistic practice is bound by a deep commitment towards decolonization, decarceration, demilitarization, and abolition. Her research interests include personal storytelling, counter-histories, South Asian diasporic and queer identities.

artist statement

As a Queer South Asian woman living in the United States, I am deeply interested in the politics of “representation” in mass media. I am drawn to the kind of self, subject, and subjectivity portrayed in moving image-making. These are issues that I have grappled with and continue to explore in my creative work.

I am 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 a determined drive for social and political 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 as an individual 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, caste, gender, and sexuality but more the intersections, overlaps, and spaces in between these categories.

Since I’m interested in these intersectionalities, I often question, push, and transgress boundaries of genre (as a form) by mixing traditional “documentary” with “fictional narratives” or even making the “fictional” aspect of “documentary” storytelling more transparent. I recognize that stories can be told from multiple viewpoints and enjoy exploring the layers of telling and re-telling “a story” from different points-of-views, stretching “representations” into “re-presentations”. My work is influenced by experimental filmmaking and “alternative” perspectives by artists from the Global South. 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

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

tel. 631.245.1747
email: sgulati@vcu.edu