Kiana Rawji is a Canadian director, writer, and producer based in Brooklyn, New York. She recently graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a joint concentration in Film and History & Literature. Through fiction and nonfiction film, she strives to close distances between people while celebrating the differences among them. As a Muslim woman and daughter of East African Asian immigrants, she is particularly interested in stories around diasporas & displacement; home & human resilience. Her TEDx talks on
Islam and the Cosmopolitan Ethic have reached over 150,000 people worldwide.

Her 2021 documentary, LONG DISTANCE, about migrant workers at an Albertan meat plant, won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Alberta Short Film at the 2021 Calgary International Film Festival. Her 2023 doc, MAMA OF MANYATTA—which screened at the 2023 Pan African Film Festival, Essence Film Festival & Zanzibar International Film Festival, with a Special Jury Mention—follows an extraordinary woman fighting HIV & gender-based-violence in a Kenyan slum. And her 2023 fiction film, INSIDE JOB, is about an Indian woman who suspects her African domestic workers of stealing jewelry in 1970s Nairobi. The film received the Harvard Film Department’s Arnheim Prize for most outstanding interdisciplinary project & premiered at the Chicago South Asian Film Festival. INSIDE JOB & MAMA OF MANYATTA both screened at the Nanji Family Foundation Auditorium at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.