IAWRT Chapter India began in 2005 under the leadership of the first Managing Trustee, Jai Chandiram. The vision of IAWRT Chapter India is to enable perspective building on issues faced by women media practitioners, while keeping a sharp focus on the changing media landscape, and work towards creating spaces free from bias, discrimination and abuse, for women media practitioners. We strive for a professional network of women media practitioners that can provide a sustaining space  to build on a shared vision and ideas. These deeper conversations are enabled through our different  activities like film festivals, seminars, workshops and exhibitions. The chapter also seeks to provide a platform to create, share, disseminate and work towards a more equitable media landscape in which women are more visible.

We have held 17 editions of the IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival (AWFF), including our first online edition held In March 2021, owing to the COVID19 pandemic. The AWFF has grown in stature and popularity with each passing year. It brings together women filmmakers of Asian origin from across the world on a common platform in Delhi around International Women’s Day for a four-day festival. A series of events like seminars, workshops, masterclasses and exhibitions are organized as parallel events to the mainline program of the festival screenings.

The travelling festivals that are an offshoot of AWFF have been highly appreciated in festivals curated in countries worldwide. The Chapter has also helped set up two important women’s festivals in Herat (Afghanistan) and Kathmandu (Nepal). We aim  to  extend such  interactions further with women film and media practitioners in other countries of the region like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

IAWRT Chapter India has a rich pool of talented members who, in addition to their own practice, work as resource persons and mentors in partnering with like-minded organisations – conducting seminars on contemporary challenges like censorship and online trolling, workshops on gender mainstreaming, media literacy, film making workshops in educational institutions, and supporting women and students working with community radio.

The current board (2022-24) comprises:

Managing Trustee: Aaradhana Kohli

Secretary: Kiron Bansal

Treasurer: Deepti Khurana

Members: Shikha Jhingan, Padmaja Shaw, Bina Paul and Anitha Balachandran

Contact details:

Email: iawrtindia@gmail.com

Website: https://www.iawrtindia.org/

Facebook: @Iawrt India

Instagram: @iawrtindia

Twitter: @IAWRT_India