Anjali Monteiro is a former Professor from the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is involved in documentary production, media teaching and research. She played a key role, along with her colleague and partner, Prof. K.P. Jayasankar, in setting up of the MA and Ph.D. programmes in Media and Cultural Studies at TISS, the first of its kind in India and has done pioneering and innovative work in critical media education in India. In recognition of their contribution, the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad conferred the Prof. Satish Bahadur Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contribution to Film Education on them, at the 6th Alpavirama — International Youth Film Festival, in November 2022.

Along with Prof. K.P. Jayasankar she has co-directed several award-winning documentaries that have been screened in festivals across the world. Among their most recent awards are the Basil Wright Prize 2013 for So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There) and Jury’s commendation in the Intangible Culture category 2019 for A Delicate Weave at the Royal Anthropological Institute Festival, UK. Along with Jayasankar, she was an invited artist at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, where Saacha (The Loom) was showcased as an installation. She has served on the jury of several film festivals including Kashish 2021, ImagineIndia, Madrid 2020 and 2021, RAI International Ethnographic Film Festival 2021, and PSBT Film Challenge 2021, among others. She has also been commissioning editor and mentor for several documentary projects.

Prof. Monteiro writes in the broad areas of censorship, documentary film and media and cultural studies and has contributed to scholarly journals and edited volumes. Her most recent publications are A Fly in the Curry — Independent Documentary Film in India, KP Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, Sage, 2016, which won a Special Mention for the best book on cinema in the National Film Awards, 2016, DigiNaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-Capitalist India, Anjali Monteiro, K.P. Jayasankar, Amit S. Rai (Eds.), Orient Black Swan, 2020 and Many Voices, Many Worlds: Critical Perspectives on Community Media in India, Sage, 2021.

Monteiro and Jayasankar retired from TISS in 2020 and continue to be active as teachers, mentors, writers and filmmakers. They are currently working on three film projects, of which two are set in Goa. They also teach documentary filmmaking to young people at Fundacao Oriente and Nirmala Institute of Education in Goa. They have recently published essays in edited volumes on cinema, including Resistance in Indian Documentary Film: Aesthetics, Culture and Practice, eds Shweta Kishore and Kunal Ray, Edinburgh University Press, 2024 and Cinemas of the Global South: Towards a Southern Aesthetics, eds Dilip M Menon and Amir Taha, Routledge, 2024.

Prof. Monteiro is a recipient of many fellowships. She has been a Howard Thomas Memorial Fellow in Media Studies (2001), at University of Western Sydney, a Fulbright visiting lecturer at University of California, Berkeley (2007), an Erasmus Mundus Scholar (2013) at Lund University, Sweden and an ICCR Visiting Professor (2013) at the University of Technology Sydney, among other accolades. She is active in campaigns for freedom of expression. She is also on the International Board of the International Association for Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT). More about her work at http://www.monteiro-jayasankar.com/.