VIVEK BALD: Director, Producer, Writer Vivek Bald is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, digital media producer, and scholar. His work over the past twenty-five years has explored the stories and experiences of South Asians in the U.S. and Britain. Bald’s first documentary, Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994) examined the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Taxi-vala premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in 1994, featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition, New Directions in Indian American Film, and was broadcast by PBS in 1996. Bald’s second film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003) focused on South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. It premiered in New York as part of Lincoln Center’s Independents Night series. It screened at two dozen film festivals in thirteen countries, from the United Kingdom to Australia to Brazil, Norway, and the Czech Republic. In 2020, Bald consulted upon and appeared in the Peabody Award winning PBS documentary series, Asian Americans. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and is the faculty Director of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, a unit devoted to the analysis and incubation of new forms of documentary: VR, AR & web-based; crowd-sourced; interactive and immersive. He is also developing “The Lost Histories Project,” an interactive documentary and participatory oral history that will build upon and extend the Bengali Harlem film and book. [Email: vbald at mit dot edu]

ALAUDIN ULLAH: Director, Producer, Writer Alaudin Ullah is a trailblazing entertainer — one of the first South Asian comedians featured nationally on HBO, MTV, BET, PBS, and Comedy Central in a career that has spanned three decades. Limited by negative stereotypes, with little to no representation of his people, Ullah turned from acting to writing. As a member of the Public Theater’s inaugural Emerging Writers Group, he wrote plays about Harlem and Bangladesh, then pursued his craft in Columbia University’s prestigious MFA Playwrighting Program, where he graduated in 2022. In the 2022 season, his solo play, Dishwasher Dreams, premiered in Chicago and at Hartford Stage, where he won the Connecticut Critics Circle award for best Solo Performance. On screen, Ullah co-starred in the film American Desi, and did several voices for the award-winning animated feature, Sita Sings the Blues. On television, he was featured in Uncle Morty’s Dub Shack (IATV). Vivek Bald’s book, Bengali Harlem, was inspired by Ullah’s plays and his family’s journey to America. He co-directed the award-winning documentary, In Search of Bengali Harlem, with Bald, which has screened in festivals across the U.S., including DocNYC, Cleveland International Film Festival, Portland Film Festival, Boston Asian American Film Festival, and the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival. In Search of Bengali Harlem will air this season on PBS. Ullah’s ongoing dedication is to creating stories and characters that counter, challenge, and correct, the misperception of South Asians and Muslims.[Email: funnyaladdin at gmail dot com]