The Bengali

Kavery Kaul is an award-winning director, producer, and writer, who uses an intimate lens to craft stories which boundlessly straddle different worlds. The founder of riverfilms, her work has been featured at DOC NYC, Telluride, London, Rotterdam, and Sydney Festivals, among other major festivals. It has reached wide audiences in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Her credits include Cuban Canvas, an Imagen Award Nominee which premiered at the Kennedy Center; Long Way from Home, a Film Threat and Time Out Critic’s Pick; and First Look, presented on PBS-TV by the National Latino Broadcasting Consortium (LPB).

The Academy Film Archive and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund are collaborating on the restoration of her film One Hand Don’t Clap with plans for re-release of this earlier work. Kavery has garnered Fulbright and Logan Fellowships and a New York City Proclamation of Excellence. Her TEDx talk speaks to the power of storytelling across divides. As Fulbright’s 75th anniversary arts speaker, she reminded listeners that “Stories Matter”. An India-born American, she serves on the Board of Manhattan Neighborhood Network, and is a member of New York Women in Film & Television, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Film Fatales, and Women Independent Producers.

Samira Asma-Sadeque is a New York-based Bangladeshi investigative journalist and poet reporting on labor, immigrant communities and hate-speech among other topics. Her work appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and Al Jazeera. Her poetry appears in the HBO series "Take Out With Lisa Ling", WNET AllArts TV's "First Twenty" series, and Button Poetry.