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AMBARIEN ALQADAR

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Born and raised in a working-class Muslim family in New Delhi, India, Ambarien Alqadar is an artist-filmmaker working across documentary, narrative, and experimental forms. She grew up in a segregated neighborhood that did not appear on maps. The experience of living in a place both inhabited and erased continues to shape her work. She was trained at AJK Mass Communication Research Center, Jamia Millia Islamia. She holds an MFA in Film & Media Arts, Temple University where she was a Fulbright-Nehru Leadership Development Fellow.

 

Moving between documentary observation, performance, archival reconstruction, voice, text, and experimental image-making, Ambarien’s work often begins where conventional records fail: in silences, absences, erased histories, and distorted accounts of lived experience. Her turn toward voice and narrative in cinema comes from this same impulse: to reclaim storytelling as a process of map making, a way to give shape, rhythm, and meaning to experiences that have been disappeared, misread, or rendered illegible. Her films often return to intimate spaces- homes, salons, streets, rooms, thresholds, where women negotiate care, survival, desire, and selfhood within structures memory, migration, gender, and the fragile relationship between personal history and political life. Situating the personal within the political, her work asks what happens when entire communities are othered, surveilled, or pushed outside the frame. Across her body of work, formal experimentation becomes an emotional practice: a way of approaching memory when evidence is incomplete, staging what cannot be directly documented.

 

Ambarien's work has been supported by the Center for Asian American Media, Doris Duke Foundation US, Thomson Foundation, UK and the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, India. She has held artist residencies at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Visual Studies Workshop and won the Mid Atlantic Creative Arts Fellowship, 2018. Her films have been selected to the Tasveer Film Festival, Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, Mumbai Film Festival, International Film Festival of India, Goa in the prestigious Indian Panorama section, International Documentary and Shorts Film Festival of Kerala and others. She has won awards from The Indian Documentary Producers Association, The Writers Ink and Society for Visual Anthropology. She is currently developing Nisa / Woman, her debut fiction feature, based on her personal documentary set in her mother's all-women beauty salon. She teaches film directing and screenwriting at School of Cinematic Arts, DePaul University, Chicago.