Shoma A. Chatterji is an Indian film scholar, author and freelance journalist. She has been the recipient of a number of awards including the National Film Award for Best Film Critic in 1991 and the National Awards for Best Writing on Cinema for her study of the works of Aparna Sen in the publication, Parama and Other Outsiders: The Cinema of Aparna Sen (2002). Notably, she is the only woman to have won both the national awards. She is the author of several biographies including those on Pramathesh Barua, Ritwik Ghatak and Suchitra Sen.
Dr Shoma A. Chatterji, Lifetime Achievement SAMMAN awardee from Rotary Metro City in 2012, is a freelance journalist, film scholar and author based in Kolkata who has been writing for forty years now.
She has won two National Awards —for ‘Best Film Critic’, in 1991 and for ‘Best Book on Cinema’, in 2002. She won the Bengal Film Journalists Association’s ‘Best Critic Award’ in 1998 and the ‘Bharat Nirman Award’ for excellence in journalism in 2004. In 2009-2010, she won a Special Award for ‘consistent writing on women’s issues’ from UNFPA-Laadli Media Awards (Eastern region). In 2010, she was bestowed the ‘Kalyan Kumar Mitra Award’, for her remarkable work in film scholarship and contribution as film critic.
She won the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 from Indywood Media Excellence for contribution to film journalism and the very prestigious Kalish Mukherjee Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bengal Film and Television Chamber of Commerce in May 2018 for her “outstanding contribution to cinema and television in West Bengal.” In October 2018, she was bestowed a Special Award from South Asian Laadli Media and Gender Sensitivity for “consistent reporting on films from a gender perspective.” She has been on the international jury of several film festivals in India and beyond.
She holds a Masters Degree in Economics, a Masters Degree in Education and a Ph.D. in History (Indian cinema). She also holds a post-graduate diploma in Journalism and Mass Communications from the Somaiya Institute (1981) in which she topped the list. She was formerly Ph.D. Supervisor for doctoral candidates in History and in English Literature at the Seacom (Skills) University.
She won a senior research fellowship from NFAI, another one from PSBT for research on the portrayal of women on television and one more post-doctoral senior fellowship from ICSSR, Delhi for research on The Working Woman in Bengali Cinema between 1950 and 2005. She has been on the jury at film festivals in India and abroad and has presented papers at different conferences and seminars in India and beyond.
Dr Shoma A. Chatterji is one of the senior-most film critics in the country She has been part of the jury at several film festivals in India and abroad. She has authored 34 books of which 20 are on Indian cinema, eight are on gender, four are short story collections, one book of translated short stories from Bengali to English and one is on the anthropological history of the city of Calcutta founded on the Goddess Kali. She lives in Kolkata with her husband.
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